Paper Blogs 01

Reference Paper

Challenges and Opportunities in Building Socially Intelligent Machines

Laurel D. Riek and Peter Robinson

(Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2011.940412)

(PDF download)

  

Overview of the Paper

Understanding the social context is one of the main challenges which are faced by the researchers working in the field of social computing, social signal processing, human-machine interaction, robotics, computer vision and any other field that is related to automatic human behavior analysis. In this paper, the authors discuss some of the challenges to build a real-time system that can process the contextual information and also and respond to it.

Social context is defined here by the environment where a person is situated. There are some factors which may influence the behavior of that person. These factors are situational context, social role, cultural conventions and social norms. Situational context and social roles may change very rapidly, even in between the same group, and very hard to detect by the machine. Again, people of different cultures show deferent social behaviors. A system trained with some specific culture may not work well while dealing with a different one. Social norms also vary widely by different cultures and locations. As a result, it is very hard to build an intelligent machine which can handle these factors.  

Though some applications have adopted some techniques to realize certain situational contexts, it is a very difficult and broader problem to make the machine learn the cultural context on the fly. Even after solving all these problems by the researchers, the large practical problem still remains, that is unpredictability of the human. Some progress can be made to tackle the challenges of this field by using the context in clever ways.    

 

Evaluation

The overall social context is defined here in the first part. After the definition, different practical problems associated with different factors are presented with examples. Then in the last part, the practical challenges associated with exploiting the contextual information to build an autonomous system are described.  

Validity of the Paper

In this paper, the practical challenges associated with building an intelligent system which can exploit the contextual information, are introduced and discussed. This creates an opportunity for future researchers in this field to use these observations. In conclusion, a valid assumption is made that some progresses can be made on tackling the challenges faced by the researchers in this field, by using the context in clever ways.

Improvement Scopes

I think in this paper the main challenges faced by the researchers in this field to build an autonomous system which can exploit context, are presented in a very nice and compact manner. Some improvements achieved by the research community by this time can be added in the next version.

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “Capturing order in social interactions [Social Sciences]”, by Alessandro Vinciarelli (Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2009.933382) (PDF Download). In the cited article, the author presents some of the most promising research directions aimed by the artificial social intelligence community and social signal processing community.