IRC Seminar, presented by Dr Carolina Fuentes: "Interaction with Emerging Technologies"

Abstract:

This talk will present 3 different projects on Human Computer Interaction Research and Emerging Technologies.

Home Essentials: Autonomous Internet of Things

We will discuss on autonomous internet of things and how predictions of people's behaviour increasingly drive interactions with a new generation of IoT services designed to support everyday life in the home, from shopping to heating. Based on the premise that such automation is difficult due to the contingent nature of people's practices, in this presentation, we explore the nature of these contingencies in depth. We discuss strategies for how designers of future predictive IoT systems may take the contingencies into account to deal with uncertainty.

Emerging Technologies in domestic scenarios: designing ethical responsibility at an early stage

The second project will delve into the impact of Emerging Technologies – particularly robots- when interacting in socio complex scenarios. We present preliminary results of workshops in collaboration with NGOs that support victims of domestic abuse.

Human-Robot Interactions in Specialised Low-Resource Environments

Building effective voice interfaces for service robots in specialised environments is difficult due to the local knowledge of workers, such as specific terminology for objects and space, leading to limited data to train language models (known as 'low-resource' domains). In this talk, I will present a project that elicitate human-robot instructions in low resource environments proposing an end-to-end language protocol to develop language models for HRI.

Short Bio on Presenter:

Dr Carolina Fuentes is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University. Working on Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction as part of the Human-Centred Computing Research Group and member of the new Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Human-Machine Systems (IROHMS). Her research focuses on Human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction and a socially responsible approach for designing technology. Particularly interested in understanding the impact of technology through a user-centred research focus in different contexts, i.e. healthcare, domestic environments, factory domains, and the global south.