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1. Before, Between, and After: Enriching Robot Communication Surrounding Collaborative Creative Activities

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.662355  

   Savery, Richard ; Zahray, Lisa ; Weinberg, Gil ( April 2021 , Frontiers in Robotics and AI)

   null (Ed.)

   Research in creative robotics continues to expand across all creative domains, including art, music and language. Creative robots are primarily designed to be task specific, with limited research into the implications of their design outside their core task. In the case of a musical robot, this includes when a human sees and interacts with the robot before and after the performance, as well as in between pieces. These non-musical interaction tasks such as the presence of a robot during musical equipment set up, play a key role in the human perception of the robot however have received only limited attention. In this paper, we describe a new audio system using emotional musical prosody, designed to match the creative process of a musical robot for use before, between and after musical performances. Our generation system relies on the creation of a custom dataset for musical prosody. This system is designed foremost to operate in real time and allow rapid generation and dialogue exchange between human and robot. For this reason, the system combines symbolic deep learning through a Conditional Convolution Variational Auto-encoder, with an emotion-tagged audio sampler. We then compare this to a SOTA text-to-speech system in our robotic platform, Shimon the marimba player.We conducted a between-groups study with 100 participants watching a musician interact for 30 s with Shimon. We were able to increase user ratings for the key creativity metrics; novelty and coherence, while maintaining ratings for expressivity across each implementation. Our results also indicated that by communicating in a form that relates to the robot’s core functionality, we can raise likeability and perceived intelligence, while not altering animacy or anthropomorphism. These findings indicate the variation that can occur in the perception of a robot based on interactions surrounding a performance, such as initial meetings and spaces between pieces, in addition to the core creative algorithms. 

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2. Illegal Trojan design and detection in asynchronous NULL Convention Logic and Sleep Convention Logic circuits

   https://doi.org/10.1049/cdt2.12047  

   Ponugoti, Kushal K. ; Srinivasan, Sudarshan K. ; Smith, Scott C. ; Mathure, Nimish ( September 2022 , IET Computers & Digital Techniques)
3. Error Resilient Sleep Convention Logic Asynchronous Circuit Design

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NEWCAS57931.2023.10198041  

   Datta, Mithun ; Bodoh, Alexander ; Sakib, Ashiq A. ( June 2023 , IEEE)
4. An Equivalence Verification Methodology for Asynchronous Sleep Convention Logic Circuits

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS.2019.8702098  

   Hossain, Mousam ; Sakib, Ashiq A. ; Srinivasan, Sudarshan K. ; Smith, Scott C. ( May 2019 , 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS))
5. Social alliances improve rank and fitness in convention-based societies

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810384116  

   Strauss, Eli D. ; Holekamp, Kay E. ( March 2019 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Social hierarchies are widespread in human and animal societies, and an individual’s position in its hierarchy affects both its access to resources and its fitness. Hierarchies are traditionally thought of in terms of variation in individual ability to win fights, but many are structured around arbitrary conventions like nepotistic inheritance rather than such traits as physical strength or weapon size. These convention-based societies are perplexing because position in the hierarchy appears to be gained irrespective of individual physical ability, yet social status strongly affects access to resources and fitness. It remains unclear why individuals abide by seemingly arbitrary conventions regarding social status when they stand to benefit by ignoring these conventions and competing for top positions or access to resources. Using data from wild spotted hyenas collected over 27 y and five generations, we show that individuals who repeatedly form coalitions with their top allies are likely to improve their position in the hierarchy, suggesting that social alliances facilitate revolutionary social change. Using lifetime reproductive success as a fitness measure, we go on to demonstrate that these status changes can have major fitness consequences. Finally, we show that the consequences of these changes may become even more dramatic over multiple generations, as small differences in social rank become amplified over time. This work represents a first step in reconciling the advantages of high status with the appearance of “arbitrary” conventions that structure inequality in animal and human societies.

    

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