Although it is widely accepted that robots will be used in everyday contexts in near future, many people feel anxious and hold negative attitudes toward robots. This negative reaction might be stronger when users come...
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Although it is widely accepted that robots will be used in everyday contexts in near future, many people feel anxious and hold negative attitudes toward robots. This negative reaction might be stronger when users come into direct physical contact with them, particularly when touch is required between robots and humans, (e.g., when using robots as assistants to help elderly people at home). Intergroup contact research in social psychology has proposed various forms of contact as a means to reduce negative feelings toward outgroup members. The present study examined how Contact Type (Actual vs. Imagined) and Contact Modality (Look vs. Touch) with a NAO robot would impact attitudes toward NAO compared to a no-contact control condition. Results showed that nearly any type of contact effectively reduced negative emotions compared to the control condition. However, for participants with preexisting negative emotions toward robots, contact sometimes produced more negative attitudes. We discuss these findings and the resulting implications for future research.
In a competitive environment where academic institutions are under pressure to develop employable graduates, the quality of education has become a crucial differentiator. Hence, a major pragmatic motivation for this a...
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In a competitive environment where academic institutions are under pressure to develop employable graduates, the quality of education has become a crucial differentiator. Hence, a major pragmatic motivation for this article was to be able to improve the quality of education: in particular, to improve the course design and delivery processes of one of the postgraduate programs within an Egyptian higher education institution. This improvement was achieved using process modeling approaches; a mixture of hard and soft modeling techniques were applied, and a case study approach was used to analyze findings both with respect to the utility of tools and the process improvement itself. Lessons learned led to suggestions for the best ways of combing approaches which included a ‘novel’ hybrid RAD-SSM model being suggested. This combined approach promises to be useful for analyzing different processes and identifying possible areas for improving educational processes.
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