The Prevailing Model in HRI Research
According to the study, just a little more than 6% of the HRI research papers in the main corpus applied the social model. The remaining 93% applied the medical model, following the lead of psychology research. Consequently, the majority of HRI research papers excluded the perspectives of autistic people and focused on using robotics to treat autism.
“Researchers are out-designing technologies that will help us control our “aggression.” What we really need is to just unpack the trauma of being autistic in a society that just can’t seem to accept that we exist,” said Rizvi.
The data shows 76 studies in the corpus used anthropomorphic and humanoid robots to teach social skills. Another 15 studies used robots that look like animals for the same purpose. One study employed a robot to diagnose “abnormal” social interactions.
Rizvi and her co-authors argue that using robots in mentor roles perpetuates the belief that autistic people are deficient in their humanity and suggests robots are well-suited to help autistic people become more human.
The team also identified 11 papers employing deficit-based language and 27 papers which contrasted “typical” versus “abnormal” development to posit non-autistic people as the norm and their autistic peers as a deviation from the norm. More than 85% of these papers placed the burden of overcoming communications difficulties entirely on autistic people.
“Fellow scientists, I am speaking to you now. It is time for us to stop perpetuating stereotypes on who autistic people are and who they ought to be. It’s definitely possible for us to start promoting autism inclusion in our work. So why aren’t we doing it?” challenged Rizvi in her video.
Proposing an Inclusive Model for Robotics
Rizvi and her coauthors aim to move HRI research in a more inclusive direction – one that mirrors the autism community’s own perspective. In their paper, the team proposes a series of ethical questions to help HRI researchers avoid common harmful stereotypes of autism and historical misrepresentations. Specifically, they ask researchers to consider the following:
- Are autistic people accurately represented in your research team?
- Were any assumptions made about the autistic user’s autonomy that would not have been made for neurotypical users?
- Is input from non-autistic third-parties given more weight than input from the autistic end-users in the design process?
- Were the needs of the participants taken into consideration in the research methodologies?
- Is your work inadvertently promoting harmful stereotypes?
They also encourage researchers to report participant demographics to help contextualize findings.
Rizvi’s work has been recognized by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, Google, Amazon and CSEdWeek (which prompted a personal note of congratulations from Vice President Kamala Harris), and she has spoken on multiple neurodiversity panels. Rizvi is advised by UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering Associate Professor Imani Munyaka, the paper’s senior author.
This article was originally published by a today.ucsd.edu . Read the Original article here. .