Service robots,care ethics,and design

It should not be a surprise in the near future to encounter either a personal or a professional service robot in our homes and/or our work places: according to the International Federation for Robots, there will be approx 35 million service robots at work by 2018. Given that individuals will interact and even cooperate with these service robots, their design and development demand ethical attention. With this in mind I suggest the use of an approach for incorporating ethics into the design process of robots known as Care Centered Value Sensitive Design (CCVSD). Although this approach was originally and intentionally designed for the healthcare domain, the aim of this paper is to present a preliminary study of how personal and professional service robots might also be evaluated using the CCVSD approach. The normative foundations for CCVSD come from its reliance on the care ethics tradition and in particular the use of care practices for: (1) structuring the analysis and, (2) determining the values of ethical import. To apply CCVSD outside of healthcare one must show that the robot has been integrated into a care practice. Accordingly, the practice into which the robot is to be used must be assessed and shown to meet the conditions of a care practice. By investigating the foundations of the approach I hope to show why it may be applicable for service robots and further to give examples of current robot prototypes that can and cannot be evaluated using CCVSD.     

Moral appearances: emotions,robots, and human morality

Can we build ‘moral robots’? If morality depends on emotions, the answer seems negative. Current robots do not meet standard necessary conditions for having emotions: they lack consciousness, mental states, and feelings. Moreover, it is not even clear how we might ever establish whether robots satisfy these conditions. Thus, at most, robots could be programmed to follow rules, but it would seem that such ‘psychopathic’ robots would be dangerous since they would lack full moral agency. However, I will argue that in the future we might nevertheless be able to build quasi-moral robots that can learn to create the appearance of emotions and the appearance of being fully moral. I will also argue that this way of drawing robots into our social-moral world is less problematic than it might first seem, since human morality also relies on such appearances.     

Deepwater tests of robots successful

With the support of the China Ocean Mineral Resources R&D Association (COMRA) and the National High Technology Development Program (dubbed "863 Program"), researchers from the CAS Institute of Automation have recently completed deep ocean tests of CR-02, an autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV) with the maximum operating depth of 6,000m they have designed and built.     

Stochastic control and time scheduling for irregular robots

Vehicles of different sizes are difficult to navigate in close vicinity. In this paper, we propose multi-vehicle coordination strategy by stochastic control and time scheduling to guarantee no collisions. We use contours and relative motions of vehicles to calculate collision time and use it in multi-vehicle scheduling and reduce computation burden. The proposed strategy enables the vehicles to add calculation delay when vehicles are moving towards the destinations. To avoid complicated control rule design for motion-restricted irregular vehicles, we propose stochastic control to provide satisfactory performance. By changing the frequency of control update, a modification is proposed to take congestion into account. Simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Implications and consequences of robots with biological brains

In this paper a look is taken at the relatively new area of culturing neural tissue and embodying it in a mobile robot platform—essentially giving a robot a biological brain. Present technology and practice is discussed. New trends and the potential effects of and in this area are also indicated. This has a potential major impact with regard to society and ethical issues and hence some initial observations are made. Some initial issues are also considered with regard to the potential consciousness of such a brain.     

社会资本、社会认知和团队知识转移

研发团队是组织进行知识创造的理想场所,团队内部的知识转移能力很大程度上决定知识创造结果.社会认知和社会资本理论经常被用来解释研发团队内部知识转移绩效.分析了这两种理论工具之间的关联,通过对这两种理论的整合,提出了影响研发团队内部知识转移绩效的一种新的理论框架.     

Modifiable futures: science fiction at the bench

Science fiction remains an alien dimension of the history of science. Historical and literary studies of science have become increasingly attentive to various "literary technologies" in scientific practice, the metaphorical features of scientific discourse, and the impact of popular science writing on the social development of scientific knowledge. But the function of science fiction and even literature as such in the history of scientific and technological innovation has often been obscured, misconstrued, or repudiated owing to conventional notions of authorship, influence, and the organic unity of texts. The better to address those close encounters where scientific practice makes use of speculative fiction, this essay proposes that we instead analyze such exchanges as processes of appropriation, remixing, and modification.     

政府补贴、企业创新和社会福利

考虑政府的最优补贴策略及其对企业、消费者和社会的影响问题。纳入政府、创新企业和异质性消费者三个主体,构建政府分别补贴给企业和消费者以及无政补贴时的博弈模型并分析均衡结果。研究表明:当创新产品生产成本处于较低或者中等水平时政府才应当实施补贴,否则不要补贴,并且创新产品生产成本越低,最优补贴额度越高。政府补贴给企业或者消费者时,等效地扩大了创新产品的需求,改善了企业收益、消费者剩余和社会福利。并且,当企业面对异质性消费者时,政府补贴对企业的新产品创新起到积极影响。     

Why robots should not be treated like animals

Responsible Robotics is about developing robots in ways that take their social implications into account, which includes conceptually framing robots and their role in the world accurately. We are now in the process of incorporating robots into our world and we are trying to figure out what to make of them and where to put them in our conceptual, physical, economic, legal, emotional and moral world. How humans think about robots, especially humanoid social robots, which elicit complex and sometimes disconcerting reactions, is not predetermined. The animal–robot analogy is one of the most commonly used in attempting to frame interactions between humans and robots and it also tends to push in the direction of blurring the distinction between humans and machines. We argue that, despite some shared characteristics, when it comes to thinking about the moral status of humanoid robots, legal liability, and the impact of treatment of humanoid robots on how humans treat one another, analogies with animals are misleading.     

Simulation of small humanoid robots for soccer domain

In this paper, we illustrate the development of a realistic simulation of a humanoid robot model in a virtual environment using USARSim (Urban Search and Rescue Simulator). USARSim provides an accurate 3D simulation of a virtual environment with a detailed rendering and a realistic physics. Moreover, USARSim allows users to observe the virtual environment from different views. One of these is the egocentric view, which can simulate the camera mounted on the robot. The small humanoid robot presented in this work is Robovie-M, developed by VStone Ltd. (Japan). This robot is used by our team Artisti in the RobotCup soccer competitions.Reported experiments compare the behaviors of a real robot and of its virtual model, when controlled by the same control software to asses the possibility to faithfully simulate a robot with 22 degrees of freedom in USARSim. Moreover, we discuss the possibility to close the control loop of the robot in simulation, by simulating also the main robot sensor, i.e. the camera.The experiments show that USARSim, despite being a simple simulator based on a low cost computer game, provides an accurate enough simulation of the physics and a realistic rendering of the 3D scene enabling a faithful simulation of a small humanoid robot at low cost. Thus, one can entirely test the robot software modules in the simulation (namely: the motion control modules, the vision system modules and, by closing the robot control loop in simulation, the behavior and behavior-selection modules).     

Underwater robots to safeguard Olympic Games in 2008

A small-sized autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV) independently developed and built by CAS researchers has been designated as an underwater guard for the forthcoming Olympic Game in 2008 in Beijing. It has recently been approved by the Olympic Sub-committee of Sailing to be a component of the "underwater safety alert system" of the competition.     

社会时空中的真理、专业知识与科学

一打开科学的匣子如同你有语言功能就会思考什么是科学一样,我是一名社会学家,也会思考什么是社会学。从研究范围的宽窄来看,如果把物理学看成是夸克,化学看成是原子,生物化学看成是大分子,生物学看成是细胞,心理学看成是一个完整的人,那么,社会学就像是一个大容器———社会共同体。很难解释社会共同体,因为你是看不到它的。你可以看见人、生物、你自己,但是,你却看不见社会共同体。这就是为什么社会学很难研究,因为你必须了解那些你没有看到过的某个社会整体。即使如此,你能通过关注周围的事物得到社会共同体的涵义,因为你是社会共同体中…     

企业社会责任、市场化程度与慈善捐赠——来自上市公司的动态面板证据

基于动机认知视角,利用2010～2016年沪深两市A股上市公司的实证数据建立GMM动态面板模型。在行业竞争强度边界下加入企业基本社会责任、市场化程度两个调节变量,从利益相关者探讨了企业慈善捐赠水平的影响因素及捐赠动机,并验证企业不同所有权制度下的捐赠水平对企业绩效的影响。结果表明:慈善捐赠水平和企业绩效之间具有双向的积极影响,民营企业影响系数更为显著,同时,两者关系受到企业基础社会责任和市场化程度的显著正调节作用。当行业竞争强度增大,市场化程度对捐赠水平和企业绩效关系的调节效应有所增加,但对基本社会责任的调节效应影响并不显著。     

互联网使用、社会资本与非农就业

基于2016年中国家庭追踪调查数据,论证互联网使用和社会资本对非农就业的作用,研究发现:互联网使用使农民非农就业的概率提高了49.3%,采用稳健性检验与工具变量法处理内生性后,这一效应依然显著;低学历、男性与90后农民非农就业受互联网使用影响更大;社会资本是互联网使用影响农民非农就业的重要渠道,即互联网使用显著增加了农民的社会资本,进而提高了农民非农就业的概率。改善农村地区互联网基础设施,推广互联网知识,有助于农民非农就业、增收与脱贫。     

社会偏好、报酬心理契合度与组织承诺

以340位企业管理者作为被试,实验研究表明,性别、年龄、受教育程度、管理层级等个体特征及规模等企业特征显著影响其社会偏好;不公平厌恶偏好、竞争性偏好对其所得报酬的心理契合度与组织承诺之间的正相关关系具有正向的调节效应,而积极互惠偏好、社会福利偏好等高传统性偏好具有负向的调节效应;进一步研究表明,控制报酬心理契合度,友好型社会偏好越强,组织承诺越高;而帕累托破坏型社会偏好越强,组织承诺越低,我国企业具备建立在亲社会性偏好基础上的特殊信任结构.