The East Asia and Pacific Studies Initiative (EAPSI) is a program run by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to encourage research collaboration between American graduate students and researchers in:
It is an amazing opportunity. The gist of the application process is you come up with a research project in conjunction with a researcher in the country of choice and then the NSF funds it. Applications are accepted without prior communication with a host country researcher, but the likelihood of acceptance is virtually nil. The first step in this process then is coming up with a researcher and project. There are several sources for potential collaborative opportunities:
After that the, the list is refined through recommendations by my adviser on more likely and interesting institutions and researchers. I then need to look at their work to come up with research possibilities.
One potential source for pertinent researchers are participants in the 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction located in Asia. Applicable papers are:
This paper describes a robotic system that uses dance as a form of social interaction to explore the properties and importance of rhythmic movement in general social interaction. The system consists of a small creature-like robot whose movement is controlled by a rhythm-based software system. Environmental rhythms can be extracted from auditory or visual sensory stimuli, and the robot synchronizes its movement to a dominant rhythm. The system was demonstrated, and an exploratory study conducted, with children interacting with the robot in a generalized dance task. Through a behavioral analysis of videotaped interactions, we found that the robot's synchronization with the background music had an effect on children's interactive involvement with the robot. Furthermore, we observed a number of expected and unexpected styles and modalities of interactive exploration and play that inform our discussion on the next steps in the design of a socially rhythmic robotic system.
This paper describes a group attention control (GAC) system that enables a communication robot to simultaneously interact with many people. GAC is based on controlling social situations and indicating explicit control to unify all purposes of attention. We implemented a semi-autonomous GAC system into a communication robot that guides visitors to exhibits in a science museum and engages in free-play interactions with them. The GAC system's effectiveness was demonstrated in a two-week experiment in the museum. We believe these results will allow us to develop interactive humanoid robots that can interact effectively with groups of people.
This paper reports a method that uses humanoid robots as a communication medium. There are many interactive robots under development, but due to their limited perception, their interactivity is still far poorer than that of humans. Our approach in this paper is to limit robots' purpose to a non-interactive medium and to look for a way to attract people's interest in the information that robots convey. We propose using robots as a passive-social medium, in which multiple robots converse with each other. We conducted a field experiment at a train station for eight days to investigate the effects of a passive-social medium.
The Human Robot Interaction 2007 conference hosted a video session, in which movies of interesting, important, illustrative, or humorous HRI research moments are shown. This paper summarizes the abstracts of the presented videos. Robots and humans do not always behave as expected and the results can be entertaining and even enlightening - therefore instances of failures have also been considered in the video session. Besides the importance of the lessons learned and the novelty of the situation, the videos have also an entertaining value.
In this research, we realize human telepresence by developing a remote-controlled android system called Geminoid HI-1. Experimental results confirm that participants felt stronger presence of the operator when he talked through the android than when he appeared on a video monitor in a video conference system. In addition, participants talked with the robot naturally and evaluated its human likeness as equal to a man on a video monitor. At this paper's conclusion, we will discuss a remote-control system for telepresence that uses a human-like android robot as a new telecommunication medium.
This paper reports on the development of a mobile robot system for operation within a house equipped with a ubiquitous sensor network. Human robot interaction is achieved through the combination of on-robot audio and laser range sensing and additional audio sensors mounted in the ceiling of the ubiquitous environment. The ceiling mounted microphone arrays can be used to summon a mobile robot from a location outside the robot's range of hearing. After the robot autonomously navigates to the desired location, the on-board microphone array can be used to locate the sound source and to recognize a series of greetings and commands.
We have taken steps towards developing a method that enables an interactive humanoid robot to adapt its speed to a walking human that it is moving together with. This is difficult because the human is simultaneously adapting to the robot. From a case study in human-human walking interaction we established a hypothesis about how to read a human's speed preference based on a relationship between walking speed and their relative position in the direction of walking. We conducted two experiments to verify this hypothesis: one with two humans walking together, and one with a human subject walking with a humanoid robot, Robovie-IV. For 11 out of 15 subjects who walked with the robot, the results were consistent with the speed-position relationship of the hypothesis. We also conducted a preferred speed estimation experiment for six of the subjects. All of them were satisfied with one or more of the speeds that our algorithm estimated and four of them answered one of the speeds as the best one if the algorithm was allowed to give three options. In the paper, we also discuss the difficulties and possibilities that we learned from this preliminary trial.
An additional source of potential opportunities for collaboration are institutions that previously participated in robotics or computer science work:
A final very broad source is to simply run down the list of participating organizations. There are likely at least 1000, so this is a somewhat daunting task.
The Graduate School of Informatics has:
The Department of Social Informatics includes:
Regional and Disaster Management Information Systems includes:
Currently at the RACE - Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering - page has publications from 2007:
These papers deal with technical aspects of robotics to an extent that I doubt my capacity to get or productively exploit a position with this laboratory.
The Department of Information Sciences seems to deal with more traditional computer science and doesn't have a stong focus on robotics.
The Wikipedia article on the school reports that that failure rate is as high as 40%. Given a lack on interesting topics, I do not particularly want to go in unexerienced in a high-pressure environment.
Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Again, this laboratory is highly technical and I have my doubts as to my potential efficacy. The research centers deal primarily with elements of robot construction such as locomotion and vision.
The ATR IRC lab is not listed as a formal participant and attempting to use them would require contacting EAPSI.
The EAPSI has a recommended contact procedure. It includes: