Notes from ACH CHI 2023 Conference in Hamburg, Germany

From the first 3 days of ACM CHI 2023

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is underway at Hamburg, Germany this week. While CHI is a pretty large gathering featuring wide-spectrum topics across different domains of Human-Computer Interaction, it also features several interesting research updates on the topic of Human Robot Interaction. We will discuss some interesting groundbreaking papers from ACH CHI 2023 in this forum. You can explore many more papers at the following link. And if you areading this article at the time of posting, there is an excellent live closing keynote coming up at around 2 AM Pacific Daylight Time (11AM local time in Germany) on Thursday April 27 on how developing software solutions for Africa is going to be different from the rest of the world.

Can Human Horse Interaction influence Human Robot Interaction?

I was impressed by the novelty of this work from researchers at University of Florida. The work is inspired by the idea that horses have performed the traditional role of being a human aide for hundreds of years, and therefore there are many clues that we can get from the ways in which humans interact with horses and use them to develop the ways humans with interact with robots. You can find a news article about the study here. The full paper is available here. One interesting tidbit I learned from this paper is that horses have many different ways of non-verbal communication that skilled trainers can interpret, and the same techniques of non-verbal communication can possibly be applied to robots.

Why Social Robots in the Home are Briefly Entertaining but Pointless?