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Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America’s past from its imminent future.

Living with Robots recounts a foundational shift in the field of robotics, from artificial intelligence to artificial empathy, and foreshadows an inflection point in human evolution. Today's robots engage with human beings in socially meaningful ways, as therapists, trainers, mediators, caregivers, and companions. Social robotics is grounded in artificial intelligence, but the field's most probing questions explore the nature of the very real human emotions that social robots are designed to emulate. Social roboticists conduct their inquiries out of necessity--every robot they design incorporates and tests a number of hypotheses about human relationships. Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano show that as roboticists become adept at programming artificial empathy into their creations, they are abandoning the conventional conception of human emotions as discrete, private, internal experiences. Rather, they are reconceiving emotions as a continuum between two actors who coordinate their affective behavior in real time. Rethinking the role of sociability in emotion has also led the field of social robotics to interrogate a number of human ethical assumptions, and to formulate a crucial political insight: there are simply no universal human characteristics for social robots to emulate. What we have instead is a plurality of actors, human and nonhuman, in noninterchangeable relationships. As Living with Robots shows, for social robots to be effective, they must be attentive to human uniqueness and exercise a degree of social autonomy. More than mere automatons, they must become social actors, capable of modifying the rules that govern their interplay with humans.-- Provided by publisher

Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) is a promising area of translational neuroscience for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). It has been widely demonstrated that this kind of advanced technological tool provides a reliable and efficient intervention for promoting social skills and communication in children with ASD. This type of treatment consists of a human-assisted social robot acting as an intervention mediator to increase competence and skills in children with ASD. Several social robots have been validated in the literature; however, an explicit technical comparison among devices has never been performed. For this reason, in this article, we provide an overview of the main commercial humanoid robots employed for ASD children with an emphasis on indications for use, pitfalls to be avoided, and recent advances. We conclude that, in the near future, a new generation of devices with high levels of mobility, availability, safety, and acceptability should be designed for improving the complex triadic interaction among teachers, children, and robots.

Technological agents could be effective tools to be used in interventions for enhancing social orienting for some young children with ASD. We examined response to social bids in preschool children with ASD and typical development (TD) at a very early age (i.e., around 3 years) using social prompts presented by technological agents of various forms and human comparisons. Children with ASD demonstrated less response overall to social bids compared to TD controls, across agents or human. They responded more often to a simple humanoid robot and the simple avatar compared to the human. These results support the potential utilization of specific robotic and technological agents for harnessing and potentially increasing motivation to socially-relevant behaviors in some young children with ASD.

This paper is devoted to the design, description and validation of the Android application TEAtreves, which focuses on structured arithmetic problem-solving for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The application contains multiple adaptations to make it suitable for users with ASD. Validation was carried out with five students with ASD, obtaining positive results which confirm the strength of TEAtreves app for users with ASD. Results and future lines of work are discussed.

Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. —derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary , Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other. Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives ; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized. 

Depression affects 32% of older adults. Loneliness and social isolation are common risk factors for depression in older adults. Mobile apps can connect users and are also effective in depression management in the general population. However, older adults have specific needs in terms of the content of depression self-care interventions and their accessibility. It remains unknown whether existing apps for depression self-care are applicable to older adults. The initial aim of this assessment was to systematically identify interactive depression self-care apps specifically designed for older adults. As we did not find any, we assessed the applicability of existing depression self-care apps to the needs of older adult users. Using an established app assessment methodology, we searched for Android and iOS interactive mental health apps providing self-care for depression in English and Chinese in the 42Matters database, Chinese Android app stores, and the first 10 pages of Google and Baidu. We developed an assessment rubric based on extensive revision of the literature. The rubric consisted of the following sections: general characteristics of the apps (eg, developer, platform, and category), app content (eg, epidemiology and risk factors of depression in older adults, techniques to improve mood and well-being), and technical aspects (eg, accessibility, privacy and confidentiality, and engagement). We identified 23 apps (n=19, 82.6%, English and n=4, 17.4%, Chinese apps), with 5 (21.7%) iOS-only apps, 3 (13%) Android-only apps, and 15 (65.2%) apps on both platforms. None specifically targeted older adults with depression. All apps were designed by commercial companies and were free to download. Most of the apps incorporated cognitive behavior therapy, mood monitoring, or journaling. All but 3 (13%) apps had a privacy and confidentiality policy. In addition, 14 (60.9%) apps covered depression risk factors in older adults, and 3 (13%) apps delivered information about depression epidemiology in older adults via a chatbot. Furthermore, 17 (73.9%) apps mentioned other topics relevant to older adults, such as pain management, grief, loneliness, and social isolation. Around 30% (n=7) of the apps were supported by an online forum. Common accessibility issues included a lack of adaptations for users with visual or hearing impairments and incompatibility with larger font sizes in the phone settings. There are no depression apps developed specifically for older adults. Available mobile apps have limited applicability to older adults in terms of their clinical and technical features. Depression self-care apps should aim to incorporate content relevant to older adults, such as grief and loss; include online communities; and improve accessibility to adapt to potential health impairments in older adults.

Despite the range of studies into grief and mourning in relation to the digital, research to date largely focuses on the cultural practices and meanings that are played out in and through digital environments. Digital Afterlife brings together experts from diverse fields who share an interest in Digital Afterlife and the wide-ranging issues that relate to this. The book covers a variety of matters that have been neglected in other research texts, for example: The legal, ethical, and philosophical conundrums of Digital Afterlife The ways digital media are currently being used to expand the possibilities of commemorating the dead and managing the grief of those left behind Our lives are shaped by and shape the creation of our Digital Afterlife as the digital has become a taken for granted aspect of human experience. This book will be of interest to undergraduates from computing, theology, business studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and education from all types of institutions. Secondary audiences include researchers and postgraduate researchers with an interest in the digital. At a practical level, the cost of data storage and changing data storage systems mitigate the likelihood of our digital presence existing in perpetuity. Whether we create accidental or intentional digital memories, this has psychological consequences for ourselves and for society. Essentially, the foreverness of forever is in question.

The teaching of children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Arabic-speaking countries depends mainly on the traditional techniques which are limited and outdated. On the other hand, smartphone applications (apps) have become an essential part of the current life style. They are literally used to accomplish thousands of different tasks related to almost every possible aspect of daily life. However, the available apps related to the children with ASD in Arabic countries are extremely rare and limited in their features and services. Motivated by that, this work tries to fill the shortage in this area by presenting MOLHEM as a helping app for Arab children with ASD that comes with an interactive avatar based chatbot. The proposed system aims mainly to improve the child’s different social skills in addition to enhance the linguistic and mathematical abilities. In fact, MOLHEM has a variety of interactive teaching tools including stories, music, videos, and others. Moreover, the chatbot allows the child to have real conversations in both Arabic or English languages with a chatbot represented by a cartoon character avatar. On the other hand, the parent will have the privileges to supervise the child’s usage of the app, get regular performance and activity reports, in addition to control the sessions’ length. In fact, MOLHEM was practically tested by a group of specialists and parents of autistics and the feedback we got was very promising. As a future work, we plan to create an IOS version, add new learning categories, allow shared playing for a group of users, and include artificial intelligence techniques.