Update 12:33 P.M.: Professor Bethel told the Washington Free Beacon that the grant she received went through the competitive review process in the scientific community, which "felt the research had a broad impact and intellectual merit."
"There is a huge concern with the gathering of sensitive information from children," she said. "It is difficult to obtain accurate information, especially when children are interviewed by an adult authority figure they are very reluctant to share information and often end up victimized and not receiving the help they need."
"This research is to explore whether the use of a robot as an intermediary would be more likely to obtain accurate information from children than an adult authority figure," Bethel continued.
"We are investigating children's experiences with bullying and also looking at their ability to accurately recall eyewitnessed events that may not be related to bullying," she said. "We have sociologists, psychologists, and social workers as well as law enforcement and school support for this research and they saw a strong need for this exploration."
Bethel added that she hopes the project will lead to robots being used in schools for these purposes.
"This is foundational research to determine if children would be more willing to share this information through the robot," she said. "Depending on the research results we are hoping to incorporate robots in schools and for use in forensic interviews in cases of maltreatment and other issues facing children in this country."
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending nearly $400,000 to study whether children will talk to robots about bullying.
The project follows previous research that sought to determine whether children would tell secrets to robots, which cost taxpayers $700,000.
The study is based on the hypothesis that children receive unintentional cues from adults making them uneasy to share things with them. The researchers seek to eliminate these cues by having kids ages eight to 11 talk to robots.
"This multidisciplinary research will compare the effectiveness of robot vs. human interviewers for gathering sensitive information from children, using situations in which this would commonly occur: cases of child eyewitness memory and child reports of bullying," a grant for the bullying project explains.
The interviews will be used for "eliciting information related to bullying," and see if elementary school kids are more comfortable sharing with robots.
Half of the study will focus on child eyewitness memory, while the other will "examine whether children who have been victimized by bullying will be more likely to disclose that victimization to a robot as opposed to a human interviewer."
"The [Principal Investigator] PI and her colleagues have been actively involved in community outreach in local middle schools and Boys and Girls Clubs with respect to the use of robots for eliciting information related to bullying, and this outreach will be extended to elementary school children involved in the current research," the grant said.
"[T]his project has the potential to transform information gathering for investigative purposes," the grant said.
Cindy Bethel, Ph. D., an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University, is leading the study, and also helmed the previous research, also funded by the NSF, that studied whether four and five-year-old children are more comfortable sharing a secret with a robot rather than a human.
She describes her philosophy as, "It is only when we are willing to explore beyond our perceived limitations that we can achieve our unlimited potential."
"We are currently working on research projects investigating the use of a robot compared to a human interviewer for gathering information," her website states. "Our most recent project is exploring the use of the NAO robot to elicit information from middle school children regarding bullying."
The previous study on secrets, which was supported by a $700,000 NSF grant, started in 2008 and was a collaborative project with Yale University.
According to results of the study published in a paper coauthored by Bethel, children were just as likely to snitch to a robot as they were to an adult.
"The qualitative results from the study indicate that the children were as likely to share the secret with the robot as the adult with a similar amount of prompting effort," the paper concluded. "Additionally, the children interacted with the robot using similar social conventions (e.g., greeting, turn-taking, etc) as observed in their interactions with the adult."
The researchers used two different robots for their study. An early prototype of ZENO, made by Hanson Robotics, was used for the pilot study, and Aldebaran’s robot NAO was used for the follow-up study.
The pilot study started out with 16 kids, but two were dropped because they "did not understand the meaning of a secret." Out of 41 children in the follow up study, five "could not remember the secret," and seven did not understand what a secret was.
The secret told to the children was, "I am afraid of (some animal, e.g., tigers) and I do not want anyone to know that I am afraid of (animal). This will be our secret."
Every kid that was in the classroom received "compensation" in the form of "a bottle of zoo animal bubbles and two or three zoo animal stickers."
The study concluded that further research was necessary. Bethel received $374,351 for the robot bullying study last July.
"Further research needs to be conducted, but it is expected that with longer interactions with the robot, the children will treat the robot more as a peer, which would be beneficial in gathering sensitive information," the paper said.