Maria Teresa Parreira, Sarah Gillet, Katie Winkle, Iolanda Leite (2023). How Did We Miss This? A Case Study on Unintended Biases in Robot Social Behavior. In Companion of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2023, New York, NY, USA. (HRI '23) PDF
TLDR: We inadvertently developed social robot behavior that was gender-biased.
In this paper, we take a look into what happened, and reflect on WHY it happened. We put this in the context of a larger conversation on design practices for HRI studies. One particularly interesting finding: while we noticed the bias in robot behavior, participants interacting with it did not. Could this be a consequence of different expectations on social interactions across genders? We discuss three different approaches to ‘correct’ social robot behavior in the presence of biases and suggest good practices to ensure that future systems might not ‘accidentally’ act differently toward different gender identities.