Tag: conference

Flaky Conferences and Journals in Human-Robot Interaction

I recently published a podcast episode in which I had the pleasure to interview the organisers of a fraudulent conference that had accepted my nonsense paper. In the meantime, more and more invitations to flaky and potentially fraudulent and predatory conferences come across my desk. They follow the same schema as the Science Horizon Conferences. It is time to start a list. I will try to keep this list updated as new invitation to submit come in. Please contact me if you cam across an event or journal that would qualify for this list.

Flaky Conferences, Symposiums and Forums

Flaky Journals

The ACE Controversy: Sex, Robots, and Politics

This episode tells the story of the infamous ACE2018 conference.

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If these are not enough publicity buzz words, then I do not know what is. In this episode we will look at the epic events around the Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE 2018) conference and the associated Love And Sex With Robots Congress. The conferences had to be cancelled following a backlash from academics around the conferences’ organisation and in particular in response to the invitation of Steve Bannon as a keynote speaker to the ACE conference. I interviewed Adrian Cheok, David Levy and Yorim Chisik about the drama that unfolded last year. Adrian is now running for office in the Australian elections for the right wing Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party.

ISSN 2703-4054

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Best Paper Award at the HRI2019 Conference

Tony Belpaeme won the best paper award at the HRI2019 conference.

Tony Belpaeme and his team won the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2019 for their paper “Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots:A Large-Scale Study“. You can download a free copy of the paper here.

The abstract of the paper is:

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of arobot’s iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3)the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot’s iconic gestures on learning gains.