Steve Benford’s research while affiliated with University of Nottingham and other places


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Publications (532)


Fig. 1. Broncomatic rider progressing to level 2 of the thrill ride.
Fig. 2. Left: The Broncomatic control interface. Right: Using Lego Mindstorm technology to safely manipulate the controls.
Fig. 3. Left: Control room with view into the environment through one-way mirrors. Right: Clover playing with a piece of string offered by the robot.
Fig. 4. Dancers with different disabilities dancing in harmony with a pair of Franka robot arms. To ensure safety, each robot is independently monitored and equipped with an emergency stop button for immediate cessation of operations if needed.
How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics
  • Preprint
  • File available

October 2024

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18 Reads

Steve Benford

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Rachael Garrett

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[...]

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Simon Castle-Green

We explore transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and roboticists across a portfolio of artworks. Brendan Walker's Broncomatic was a breath controlled mechanical rodeo bull ride. Blast Theory's Cat Royale deployed a robot arm to play with a family of three cats for twelve days. Different Bodies is a prototype improvised dance performance in which dancers with disabilities physically manipulate two mirrored robot arms. We reflect on these to explore how artists shape robotics research through the two key strategies of improvisation and provocation. Artists are skilled at improvising extended robot experiences that surface opportunities for technology-focused design, but which also require researchers to improvise their research processes. Artists may provoke audiences into reflecting on the societal implications of robots, but at the same time challenge the established techno-centric concepts, methods and underlying epistemology of robotics research.

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Decoding AI in Contemporary Art: A Five-Trope Classification for Understanding and Categorization

June 2024

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25 Reads

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1 Citation

Leonardo

The article presents a historical overview of the classification of contemporary artworks that either have utilized artificial intelligence as a tool in their creation or focus on AI as their central theme or subject matter. The authors analyze artworks and descriptions, focusing on artists’ motivations and AI’s role in their practice, identifying five distinct tropes in AI art. The authors compare artworks with respect to key questions, creating a useful tool for art historians, curators, researchers, and artists. This historical classification provides a structured approach to understanding AI art’s creative significance and attributes as it has developed over time.


Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans

May 2024

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18 Reads

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4 Citations

We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project’s design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot and its autonomous systems, the custom end-effectors and robot attachments, the diverse roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and the custom-designed enclosure. Subsequently, we provide a detailed account of key moments during the deployment and discuss the design implications for future multispecies systems. Specifically, we argue that designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the ‘world’ in which the technology operates. Finally, we highlight the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.


Fig. 2: Illustration of the framework of the VISIONGUIDE approach.
Fig. 3: Illustration of the sliding window and the moving steps.
Fig. 6: The original heatmap generated by Algo. 1 with input arguments: slidewin = [800, 800], istep = jstep = 40, h = 10) and its smoothed ones using Gaussian filter with σ = 10 and σ = 20. For better illustration, the bottom images are cropped from the patches annotated by the green rectangles in the top.
Fig. 8: Example images with different ambient contexts from the SWAD dataset.
Fig. 9: Illustration of normalised distance for Artcode localisation accuracy. Blue circles with a radius of one normalised distance (annotated by 1) exactly cover entire Artcodes, and the ones with 2 normalised distances of two may cover Artcodes' surrounding areas. The recognisable foreground of an Artcode is within one normalised distance, while its background imagery is within the range of the normalised distance of 2. The ground truth location of the Artcode is the centre of the blue circles, highlighted by a blue star ( * ).
Uncovering the Metaverse within Everyday Environments: a Coarse-to-Fine Approach

April 2024

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56 Reads

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1 Citation

The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro has reignited interest in the metaverse, showcasing the intensified efforts of technology giants in developing platforms and devices to facilitate its growth. As the metaverse continues to proliferate, it is foreseeable that everyday environments will become increasingly saturated with its presence. Consequently, uncovering links to these metaverse items will be a crucial first step to interacting with this new augmented world. In this paper, we address the problem of establishing connections with virtual worlds within everyday environments, especially those that are not readily discernible through direct visual inspection. We introduce a vision-based approach leveraging Artcode visual markers to uncover hidden metaverse links embedded in our ambient surroundings. This approach progressively localises the access points to the metaverse, transitioning from coarse to fine localisation, thus facilitating an exploratory interaction process. Detailed experiments are conducted to study the performance of the proposed approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in Artcode localisation and enabling new interaction opportunities.


The Purr-suit of Happiness: A Tale of Three Kittens. Robots, Humans, Cats, and AI

March 2024

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11 Reads

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2 Citations

This paper showcases Cat Royale, an exploration of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on animal happiness situated at the intersection of Art, Computer Science, and Animal Welfare. We argue for the inclusion of non-human actors when designing autonomous systems, as animals increasingly interact with them. In this endeavour, we emphasise multidisciplinarity when designing trustworthy autonomous systems. To design, implement, and deploy such systems, diverse voices must be heard. Finally, by highlighting parallels between Cat Royale's animal-robot interactions and human-AI interactions, this project invites reflections on the trustworthiness, risks, and the price we might pay for AI.


Cat Royale

January 2024

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62 Reads

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3 Citations

interactions

Would you let a robot care for your pet? Blast Theory’s Cat Royale explores the impact of AI on humans and animals. For 12 days, Ghostbuster, Pumpkin, and Clover played with a robot arm that offered them games, toys, and treats every few minutes. The robot threw balls and dropped them into a ball run. It dangled feathers, offered snacks, and introduced a cardboard box. It rang bells and dragged a toy mouse. But is it good for these cats—and would it really be good for us—if AI could learn to deliver all of our desires all of the time?



Resilient digital technologies

January 2024

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23 Reads

Presenting key examples and case studies of how design has responded to the pandemic, Design and Covid-19 offers lessons and approaches to design for future resilience. Design has a key role to play in not only creating products to ensure safety from the pandemic, but also in the creation of complex systems, new technologies and physical environments that enable us to carry out our lives and protect populations in the future. Design and Covid-19 identifies four key phases of the pandemic to examine how designers developed systems, services, communications and products as part of our response to the crisis, whether at an international, national or community level. Contributors report from a range of international contexts, including countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia, detailing how countries responded to the pandemic, introduced social distancing and lockdowns, developed test, track and trace systems, implemented new laws and how design and designers responded to the urgent new challenges that the pandemic created. They explore the adaptation of designs as communities searched for new ways of connecting and working through restrictions and social distancing measures, establishing local mutual aid groups and using social media to support each other through the pandemic, and go on to focus on recovery and resilience, analysing the deeper, systemic design response as industries emerge from lockdown. They explore the need to reflect on and investigate key issues in order to understand what we can learn personally, socially, economically and globally from this unprecedented crisis. Drawing upon the expertise of scholars from across the globe, Design and Covid-19 explores a wide range of design disciplines to address the complex societal and global issues highlighted throughout the pandemic, and to inform new ways of building human and planetary wellbeing.


Exploring Effects of a Nostalgic Storytelling Virtual Reality Experience Beyond Hedonism

December 2023

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28 Reads

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1 Citation

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking

In this study, we tested the effect of a nostalgic storytelling virtual reality (VR) experience (vs. a text-reading neutral VR experience as the comparison condition) on state-level eudaimonic well-being and explored the underlying mediating mechanisms. In a within-subject experimental design, all 31 participants experienced both versions of the VR in pseudorandomized and counterbalanced order. Compared with the text-reading VR experience, the nostalgic storytelling VR resulted in significantly higher hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment media gratifications (aka. media enjoyment and media appreciation, respectively), social connectedness, and state-level well-being. Moreover, the relationship between VR and well-being was serially mediated by the level of state nostalgia and eudaimonic media gratifications. That is, the nostalgic storytelling VR was found to evoke state nostalgia, which led to a greater appreciation of the VR experience; this appreciation, in turn, contributed to increased state-level well-being. Implications of the study findings for future research and practice are discussed.


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Citations (57)


... Ethical: Artists can contribute to ethical discussions, both in public and academic forums, by providing powerful first-hand experiences of robots that raise questions about future impacts. They can do so by adopting various stances towards robots (and AI more generally), from viewing them as tools for creating art, to being co-creators, to being the subject of critical inquiry [24]. Moreover, a given artwork may combine stances as artists both embrace a technology to create an artwork while also being skeptical or critical about it. ...

Reference:

How Artists Improvise and Provoke Robotics
Decoding AI in Contemporary Art: A Five-Trope Classification for Understanding and Categorization
  • Citing Article
  • June 2024

Leonardo

... Blast Theory's Cat Royale 2 engaged public audiences in reflecting on trust in robots by creating a so-called 'cat utopia', the purpose designed enclosure shown in Figure 3 right that housed a family of three cats for six hours a day for twelve days, at the centre of which sat a robot arm that tried to increase their happiness by playing games with them [26]. ...

Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans

... Kata Metaverse pertama kali muncul dalam novel fiksi ilmiah karya Neal Stephenson berjudul Snow Crash pada tahun 1992 [7], tetapi istilah ini baru mulai populer di tahun 2021 ketika Mark Zuckerberg mengganti nama Facebook menjadi Meta, dan telah melakukan investasi di Metaverse [8]. Rilisnya produk bernama Apple Vision Pro pada tahun 2024 semakin menambah minat dan perhatian terhadap Metaverse [9]. Konsep Metaverse semakin dekat dengan kita lebih dari yang dibayangkan, walaupun masih dalam tahap pengembangan, tetapi bukan tidak mungkin Metaverse yang dianggap sebagai mimpi ini suatu saat berubah menjadi kenyataan [10]. ...

Uncovering the Metaverse within Everyday Environments: a Coarse-to-Fine Approach

... Se trata de lo que la audiencia experimenta al interactuar con la obra de arte. Por lo tanto, no es sorprendente que el creciente cuerpo de investigación basada en la práctica de las AI esté empujando los límites de nuestro conocimiento en HCI (en particular el lado de la práctica profesional [46]) hacia una nueva época de entrelazamientos [1], [47]. ...

FUTURE MACHINE: Making Myths & Designing Technology for a Responsible Future: Making Myths and Entanglement: Community engagement at the edge of participatory design and user experience
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • November 2023

... While these ideas are perhaps so familiar as to seem like common sense, they actually reflect a particular underlying worldview of how humans should experience robots and AI in the future. A key role for artists is to challenge such concepts by engaging robots with the messy and ambiguous world of human experience [3]. The boundaries of play and safety are re-negotiated in The Broncomatic and Cat Royale, leading us to consider the extent of our freedom to learn about and experience the world through our bodies. ...

Five Provocations for a More Creative TAS
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • July 2023

... In our future work, we plan to employ computational interaction methods [55] to gain insights into users' understanding of swarm interaction and optimise the associated control model, aiming to further enhance performance. However, it is worth highlighting that despite our limited understanding of the control principles governing Swarm Manipulation, our research has already demonstrated significant benefits in manipulation tasks, thereby underscoring the potential of this field to define new interaction paradigms in the future [56,57]. ...

Toward Understanding the Design of Intertwined Human–Computer Integrations

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

... The review is expected to motivate further research in this field and contribute to data, information, and communication management for animal welfare. The research of Chamberlain et al. [42] focuses on the role of trust in autonomous animal-centric robotic systems and aims to understand how to design, develop, and evaluate such systems through a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach. The paper delves into the complex nature of trust, especially in contexts where animals, humans, and intelligent systems come together in a social context. ...

Designing for Trust: Autonomous Animal - Centric Robotic & AI Systems
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • March 2023

... Its emergence in m seums as a broad area contributed to its relevance as an emerging area for researchers Cluster five: Museum design, experience, and sustainability. This cluster (purpleored) highlights terms related to design, experience, and sustainability [121][122][123][124]. terms in this cluster indicate a focus on understanding how museum architecture and sign influence visitor experiences and satisfaction, particularly in cultural and herit contexts. ...

Data-inspired co-design for museum and gallery visitor experiences

Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design Analysis and Manufacturing

... AI-driven tools are increasingly employed for monitoring and addressing mental health issues in the workplace, which can be done using remote health monitoring systems by tracking vital signs and health metrics and providing real-time information to healthcare professionals for early detection of health issues among workers [4,45]. In addition, NLP can play a role in analyzing workers' communication for signs of stress, enabling timely interventions and support [38]. ...

Feasibility and acceptability of an Internet of Things-enabled sedentary behavior intervention: mixed-methods study (Preprint)

Journal of Medical Internet Research

... Therefore, principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) [65] were embedded from the start. This was especially important given the multidisciplinary nature of the research team, who approached the project with different priorities and experiences [66]. One early exercise to establish common ground was the use of Moral-IT cards, which are designed to encourage reflection and engagement in ethics-by-design [67], to highlight potential ethical questions surrounding the development of technology. ...

Reflections on RRI in “TAS for health at home”

Journal of Responsible Technology