Researchers from the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML) at the University of the United Arab Emirates are giving a robot its own Facebook profile page to explore “human-robot relationships.”
Research indicates that humans gradually lose interest in interactive robots after a few weeks. Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis, Lab director at IRML, hopes to change that by studying how humans interact with a robot on the social web.
“An existing robot equipped with face recognition, a simple dialog system, and a real-time Facebook connection will be deployed, and will encounter humans in the environment of our lab,” according to the IRML website.
“The robot will create a personal entry for itself in Facebook. Upon meeting a human it has not encountered before, it will ask for his/her name, and search for him in Facebook. Upon finding him, the human’s Facebook entries (age, home town, profession) will serve as a starting point for simple dialogs.”
The robot is named and modeled after Arabic scholar Ibn Sina aka Avicenna. The robots interactions with humans will be logged on its Facebook profile.
“Upon further future encounters, the robot will also use memories from past encounters with the human as a point of conversation (‘remember last Sunday when…’),” according to IRML.
“As the human and the robot are embedded in a social web, possible co-acquaintances between the robot and the human will be exploited too: encounters with and / or information about mutual friends will also be used: (‘I saw Michael yesterday’).”
