Kate Darling on ‘Electronic Love, Trust, & Abuse: Social Aspects of Robotics’

On March 31, We Robot 2016 will host four workshops designed by experts to help people from other disciplines get up to speed in their specialty. We hope these workshops will be attended by people who want to learn about the topics, and by people willing to share their expertise with both experts and neophytes.

What are research methods? How do you conduct a study? Are researchers biased? This session is your primer if you want to get into social science or you want to be able to make snarky comments about other people’s work. The field of human-robot interaction is rife with social science methods, because human behavior is usually way more interesting than robot behavior. Social science studies involve research methods and statistics. In this session, we’ll be covering the former, i.e. how to design and execute an investigation. There will be little to no math (sorry, math nerds), and many examples with robots.

Dr. Kate Darling will join We Robot 2016 to hold a workshop on Electronic Love, Trust, & Abuse: Social Aspects of Robotics on Thursday, March 31st at 11:15 AM at the University of Miami Newman Alumni Center in Coral Gables, Florida. Dr. Darling is a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center. Her interest is in how technology intersects with society. Kate’s work has explored economic issues in intellectual property systems and increasingly looks at the near-term effects of robotic technology, with a particular interest in law, social, and ethical issues. She runs experiments, holds workshops, writes, and speaks about some of the more interesting developments in the world of human-robot interaction, and where we might find ourselves in the future.