Ethical issues in robot-assisted play for children with special needs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robot-assisted therapy for children with autism has become increasingly widespread over the past 20 years. Currently most major robotics laboratories worldwide have a project on this topic, and many encouraging results have been published. My own research team has investigated this area since the late 1990s, using different robotic platforms, ranging from machine-like to zoomorphic and humanoid robots. In a number of studies, we focused on specific therapeutic or educational goals, but a key part has been the encouragement of play, and the need to include other people, apart from the child with autism, in the interaction with robot -grounding mechanical/robotic interaction in human experience and meaning. Thus, the robot adopts the role of a social mediator. My talk will discuss some of the ethical challenges involved in the design and conduct of this research, discussing different levels of potential benefits for the children, and different roles robots can play in teaching children with special needs in general, and children with autism in particular, about communication and interaction skills.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it