Lectures
Inspired, not required, reading
Note to Leiden students: Please note that closed source literature can typically be obtained through the Leiden University library online (log in first) and lecture recordings can be found on Brightspace. The references below are just seeds and starting points for inspiration, a lot more can be found online about these topics.
NOTE: schedule may be subject to change (except for Lecture 1+2)
Lecture 1
In this first lecture we will introduce the idea behind this course, and explore emotional and curious creatures.
Some general references:
Bots Like You web site, as well as the discover more links there.
Anthropomorphism (Wikipedia). The premise of this course is that we learn from bots about ourselves. But there are also risks or downsides to exaggerated anthropomorphisation. See for instance #NotMyRobots.
Dennett, D.C., (1971) Intentional Systems, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.68, No. 4, (25 February 1971), pp.87-106.
I.J. Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1966
Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Man a Machine. Elie Luzac, Leiden, 1748 (French-English edition, Gertrude Carman Bussey, 1912).
Maya B. Mathur, David B. Reichling. Navigating a social world with robot partners: A quantitative cartography of the Uncanny Valley. Cognition, Volume 146, 2016, Pages 22-32
M. Mori, K. F. MacDorman and N. Kageki, "The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]," in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 98-100, June 2012. Translated from M. Mori, "The uncanny valley", Energy, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 33-35, 1970. See also the links at the end of this Spectrum publication and Uncanny Valley (Wikipedia).
Emotional bots
Some background reading and viewing on some of the topics:
Bots Like You - emotional bots
Heider, F, & Simmel, M. (1944). “An experimental study of apparent behavior“. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259
Kismet website and a short movie on how Kismet works (social drive to drive exploration, overstimulation then let's it back off; an emotional homeostat).
Curious bots
Bots Like You - curious bots
Senster website. Check out Senster on Sundays at 1430 (and Spatial Sounds (100db at 100 km/h) by Edwin van der Heide) at REBOOT, Nieuwe Instituut.
cyberneticserendipity.net, web site dedicated to the Cybernetic Serendipity Expo including Senster (full expo catalogue)
[off topic: the other major early cybernetic art expo: Jack Burnham. Software - Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. Exhibition Catalogue, Jewish Museum, New York, 1970.]
A. Zivanovic. "The Development of a Cybernetic Sculptor: Edward Ihnatowicz and The Senster", ACM “Creativity and Cognition Conference 2005” April 12-15, 2005, London, UK
Nicolas Schöffer, CYSP-1, a robotic danser (1956), description at Cybernetic Zoo
Homeostat on Wikipedia
Sabrina Verhage. TRACK AND TRACE: Improving the chance for serendipitous encounters in urban public space using a drawing bot. MSc Thesis, Media Technology, Leiden University. August 25, 2015.
Track and Trace on Sabrina Verhage's website
Accomplice, by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders
Lecture 2
Please complete assignment 1 before lecture 2.
Creative bots
Bots Like You - creative bots
Artist & Robots, exhibition at Grand Palais, 2018. Articles DigiCult, Vogue, Butterfly Art News, Journal18.
Shimon performs Steady as she goes, Youtube.
Shimon public web site. Check out some of its videos from Tivoli, Utrecht.
Shimon academic website @GeorgiaTech.
Bretan, M., and Weinberg, G. “A Survey of Robotic Musicianship,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 5, pp. 100-109, 2016.
Jules Verdijk. Evolving Affective Abstract Art through Measures Learned from a Corpus of Human-Made Art. MSc Thesis Media Technology, August 2015.
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. The Ergo-Robots experiment. Youtube: short movie, lecture, movie by Fondation Cartier on expo in collab with David Lynch, Pierre-Yves' channel.
Jelger Kroese, Lise Stork and Roland van Dierendonck. Emerging Traces. Documentation Jelger, Roland.
Alexandra Barancova & Kees Sommer. Ediacaran Dreamings. New Media New Technology 2018.
Helpless bots
Bots Like You - helpless bots
Paro Therapeutic Robot
Geva, N., Uzefovsky, F. & Levy-Tzedek, S. Touching the social robot PARO reduces pain perception and salivary oxytocin levels. Sci Rep 10, 9814 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66982-y [note there are quite a few papers available discussing whether Paro has value in care or not]
The Helpless Robot. Description at Transmediale, source code.
Hitchbot introduces itself on Vimeo.
Todd Leopold. HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia. CNN. August 4, 2015.
Maarten Lamers and Peter van der Putten. Helpless by Design: Helplessness as a Feature. The Imperfectly Relatable Robot (ImpRR23): An interdisciplinary workshop on the role of failure in HRI. Workshop at HRI 2023. [videos]
David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller. The Death and Lives of hitchBOT: The Design and Implementation of a Hitchhiking Robot. Leonardo 2017 50:1, 77-78
Jordan Wolfson. MANIC/LOVE. Exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 2016-2017.
Radiolab, Furbidden Knowledge, May 31, 2011. Radiolab episode interviewing Freedom Baird on the Upside down Furby experiment, rerunning the experiment in the studio, and interviewing Caleb Chung, the inventor of Furby and Sherry Turkle, MIT Media Lab.
Lecture 3
Deadline for team formation for the final project (groups of 1 - 3). Please complete assignment 2 before lecture 3.
Obedience and Conformity
Asch, S.E. "Opinions and social pressure". Scientific American. 193 (5): 31–35, 1955. Youtube video.
Milgram, Stanley. "Behavioral Study of Obedience". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–8, 1963. Youtube video.
Evelien Mols. Algorithmic Authority: Motives behind relinquishing decision-making to artificially intelligent systems. MSc thesis Media Technology, Leiden University, 2020. Short video in Dutch.
Donna Schreuter. Conformity with Conversational Assistants. MSc thesis Media Technology, Leiden University 2020.
Donna Schreuter, Peter van der Putten and Maarten H. Lamers. Trust Me on This One: Conforming to Conversational Assistants. Minds & Machines 31, pp 535–562, 2021.
Would you do as the robot commands? Project page HCI Lab University of Manitoba incl a link to the paper Derek Cormier, Gem Newman, Masayuki Nakane, James E. Young, Stephane Durocher. Would You Do as a Robot Commands? An Obedience Study for Human-Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, iHAI'13, 2013
Bartneck, C., Verbunt, M., Mubin, O., & Mahmud, A. A. To kill a mockingbird robot. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Washington DC pp. 81-87, 2007.
Kate Darling. Why we have an emotional connection to robots. TED Salon.
Bonding
Rosen Bogdanov and Peter van der Putten. Hello Plant! Deepening Human Connections to Plants by Sonic Augmentation. AR[t], vol 6, May 2014,pp 42-47.
Geurtsen A., Lamers M.H., Schaaf M.J.M. (2015) Interactive Digital Gameplay Can Lower Stress Hormone Levels in Home Alone Dogs — A Case for Animal Welfare Informatics. In: Chorianopoulos K., Divitini M., Baalsrud Hauge J., Jaccheri L., Malaka R. (eds) Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2015. ICEC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9353. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24589-8_18.
Joost Mollen, Peter van der Putten, and Kate Darling. 2023. Bonding with a Couchsurfing Robot: The Impact of Common Locus on Human-Robot Bonding In-the-Wild. J. Hum.-Robot Interact. 12, 1, Article 8 (March 2023), 33 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563702
Sung JY., Guo L., Grinter R.E., Christensen H.I. (2007) “My Roomba Is Rambo”: Intimate Home Appliances. In: Krumm J., Abowd G.D., Seneviratne A., Strang T. (eds) UbiComp 2007: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2007.
Lecture 4
Religious bots. Why are we religious creatures? Perhaps the bots can tell us.
Religious bots at Bots Like You.
Adrienna Mayor. Gods and Robots: Ancient Dreams of Technology [broader talk than just religion]
Jeremy Hsu. How the religious see robots. Lovesick cyborg, Discover Magazine. Dec 1 2014.
MacDorman, K. F., & Entezari, S. O. (2015). Individual differences predict sensitivity to the uncanny valley. Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, 16(2), 141–172. https://doi.org/10.1075/is.16.2.01mac
Swift, C. (2015). Robot Saints. Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 4(1), 52-77. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/577300.
Mikkel at Highlight Delft, interview, Curved Sounds
Lecture 5
Question slots where you can sign up for slots for you or your group to talk to Peter & TAs, either about the concept but also about the realisation and technical questions. Notification will follow.
Plus time to work with your group on your project plus walk around support.
Lecture 6 [tbc]
Mini-excursion within the university to visit a lab with some awesome instruments. We will leave from the lecture room at 13:15.
Then back for workshops organised by TAs and guests (news will follow).
Lecture 7 [tbc]
Question slots where you can sign up for slots for you or your group to talk to Peter & TAs, either about the concept but also about the realisation and technical questions. Notification will follow.
Plus time to work with your group on your project plus walk around support.
Final Expo
3 weeks after lecture 7. Mini exhibition (in the classerooms) with a presentation of your creature.
Related conferences and journals
These resources are more robot and less human centric but still good resources
Journals
ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
Conferences