From Modelling to Understanding Children's Behaviour in the Context of Robotics and Social Artificial Intelligence
This work tackles the problem of improving robot interventions for children, including neurodiverse ones, by integrating insights from developmental sciences, AI, and social robotics, but it is incremental as it focuses on discussion and common ground rather than new solutions.
The paper addresses the challenge of modeling children's complex cognitive processes and behavior in interactions with robots and social AI, highlighting gaps in addressing neurodiverse children's needs, and aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration through a workshop.
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot interventions. However, children's development involve complex faculties such as exploration, creativity and curiosity which are challenging to model. Also, often children express themselves in a playful way which is different from a typical adult behaviour. Different children also have different needs, and it remains a challenge in the current state of the art that those of neurodiverse children are under-addressed. With this workshop, we aim to promote a common ground among different disciplines such as developmental sciences, artificial intelligence and social robotics and discuss cutting-edge research in the area of user modelling and adaptive systems for children.