STAI CDT student Lennart Wachowiak has had the paper ‘When Do People Want an Explanation from a Robot?’ accepted at this year’s upcoming 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024).
Lennart explains the aim of the research here: ‘In our most recent work, we set out to identify after what type of events people want to receive an explanation from a robot. This insight is crucial since we want to develop explainability mechanisms not just for the sake of solving an engineering challenge but to solve a real problem and align the robot’s behavior with peoples’ values and needs. As a result, we provide a set of interactions and events, grounded in literature and verified empirically, in which people show the need for an explanation, for instance, the robot violating a social norm or being uncertain about how to fulfill a request. In many of the scenarios, we found not only that people want an explanation but also that they value explanations more than other types of communication, such as apologizing or simply saying what happened.’
The research project was carried out in collaboration with two undergraduate research interns —Haris Kamran and Andrew Fenn— whom Lennart supervised over the summer as part of King’s KURF scheme.
Lennart really enjoyed the research and is looking forward to attending HRI 2024. He said, ‘It was a really fun project in which I not only got to learn how to conduct large-scale online questionnaire studies but also had the fantastic help of two undergraduate research interns, Haris Kamran and Andrew Fenn. Now, I am looking forward to presenting the paper in Boulder. Afterwards, I will stay some extra days to see Denver and some of Colorado’s beautiful mountains.’
You can read the paper (pre-print) here: Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Fenn, Haris Kamran, Andrew Coles, Oya Celiktutan, Gerard Canal; When Do People Want an Explanation from a Robot?