Amélie Lecornec

Best Student paper for Silvia Tulli at ICSR 2020

Last week, on November 14-16th, 2020, the finalists of the student paper competition were named during the ICSR 2020. This 12th edition of the conference brought together academics, researchers, and industry focused on the developing of social robots and understanding how these systems will be integrated into the fabric of our society.

Silvia Tulli and her co-authors won an Award along with 4 other finalists.

Title : Explainable Agency by Revealing Suboptimality in Child-Robot Learning Scenarios

Authors: Silvia Tulli, Marta Couto, Miguel Vasco, Elmira Yadollahi, Francisco Melo and Ana Paiva

Abstract: Revealing the internal workings of a robot can help a human better understand the robot’s behaviors. How to reveal such workings, e.g., via explanation generation, remains a significant challenge. This gets even more complex when these explanations are targeted towards children. Therefore, we propose a search-based approach to generate contrastive explanations using optimal and sub-optimal plans and implement it in a scenario for children. In the application scenario, the child and the robot learn together how to play a zero-sum game that requires logical and mathematical thinking. We report results around our explanation generation system that was successfully deployed among seven-year-old children. Our results show trends that the generated explanations were able to positively affect the children’s perceived difficulty in learning the zero-sum game.

http://springer.nl.go.kr/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-62056-1_3