Culturally Sensitive Social Robotics for Africa
Work Plan Deliverables Software
CSSR4Africa is a three-year research project to develop culturally sensitive social robotics for Africa. It has the following objectives.
In order to ensure that the project objectives can be achieved in the time available, we restrict the scope of the project to the cultures and social practices that are prevalent in Rwanda and South Africa.
Loosely based on work by Bruno et al. (2017), this figure illustrates the concept of a culturally competent robot. Cultural competence involves cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity, i.e., the ability to exhibit behaviour based on the general cultural preferences of a population using ethnographic data stored in a cultural knowledge base (the robot’s right think bubble). Cultural competence also involves the ability to infer the cultural preferences of an individual and avoid stereotypical interaction (the robot’s left think bubble), all of which allows the robot to interact in an empathetic manner.
CSSR4Africa focusses on cultural sensitivity. We plan to extend the work to cultural competence in a follow-on project.
(The empathy symbol is courtesy of www.empathysymbol.com.)
Reference: B. Bruno, N. Y. Chong, H. Kamide, S. Kanoria, J. Lee, Y. Lim, A. K. Pandey, C. Papadopoulos, I. Papadopoulos, F. Pecora, A. Saffioti, and A. Sgorbissa, “Paving the way for culturally competent robots: A position paper”, in 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Lisbon, Portugal, 2017, pp. 553-560.
Papers, abstracts, posters, and presentations that describe the project are available on the Publications page.