Studying the long-term use of robots in the home

Abstract

Commercially available social robots are finally here. People say that affordable, mass-produced autonomous robot companions are infiltrating the global market by storm in 2018. Which factors can explain why some people will accept (or reject) these social robots in their homes? What happens when people are confronted with these robots and start using them in their private spaces? How social are these robots? And how will users respond to these social behaviors of robots? Maartje de Graaf will provide some answers to these questions based on her PhD research that has focused on the long-term acceptance of social robots in home environments. Envisioning a future in which the social abilities of robots can only increase, her current research interest focuses on people’s social, emotional and cognitive responses to robots including the societal and ethical consequences of those responses.

Bio

Maartje de Graaf is a social and behavioral scientist in the multidisciplinary field of human-robot interaction. Her research is motivated by my intrinsic drive to understand human behavior and its underlying psychological and cognitive processes. Her research interest is on the intersection of interpersonal communication, social and cognitive psychology, and socially interactive technology with a focus on social robots. Her past research indicates a strong impact of human- technology relationships in the emergence of long-term acceptance of social robots in everyday environments. Envisioning a future in which the social abilities of robots can only increase, her research agenda evolves around the social, emotional and cognitive responses from users to robots including the societal and ethical consequences of such responses. The end goal is to influence technology design and policy direction to pursue the development of socially acceptable robots that benefit society.

Maartje joined Brown’s Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative in 2017 with a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The research project aims to investigate the underlying psychological and cognitive processes of how people explain robot behaviors, and whether and how these processes differentiate from how people explain human behaviors. Before starting at Brown University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication Science, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Maartje has a Bachelor of Business Administration in Communication Management (2005), a Master of Science in Media Communication (2011), and a PhD in Communication Science and Human-Robot Interaction (2015).