Abstract. We investigate the relationship between the embodiment of an artificial companion and user perception and interaction with it. In a Wizard of Oz study, 42 users interacted with one of two embodiments: a physical robot or a virtual agent on a screen through a role-play of secretarial tasks in an office, with the companion providing essential assistance. Findings showed that participants in both condition groups when given the choice would prefer to interact with the robot companion, mainly for its greater physical or social presence. Subjects also found the robot less annoying and talked to it more naturally. However, this preference for the robotic embodiment is not reflected in the users' actual rating of the companion or their interaction with it. We reflect on this contradiction and conclude that in a task-based context a user focuses much more on a companion's behaviour than its embodiment. This underlines the feasibility of our efforts in creating companions that migrate between embodiments while maintaining a consistent identity from the user's point of view.

In this paper we discuss how the EMOTE project will design, develop and evaluate a new generation of artificial embodied tutors that have perceptive capabilities to engage in empathic interactions with learners in a shared physical space.

The work presented in this paper reports the influence of a social robot on hand washing behaviour on school children in rural India with a significant presence of indigenous tribes. We describe the design choices of our social robot to cater the requirements of the intervention. The custom built wall mounted social robot encouraged 100 children to wash their hand at appropriate time (before meal and after toilet) using the correct handwashing technique via a poster on a wall. The results indicate that the intervention using the robot was found to be effective (40% rise) at increasing levels of hand washing with soap and with a better handwashing technique in ecologically valid settings.

In this paper we present our preliminary results from the first trial conducted with "WallBo" a robotic buddy to improve handwashing for children in schools. The one-week trial was carried out in a Scottish school with 16 pupils, aged 6-7 in an ecologically valid setting.The 1:1 interaction with WallBo resulted in 86.25% handwashing compliance, a 33.25% improvement from the baseline handwashing technique pre-WallBo training, and an overall, ≈35% improvement on knowledge about hand hygiene. We also report some insights about perceptions about WallBo in this paper.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in interaction design; User interface design.

This work investigates the role of the attraction paradigm-the tendency to associate similarity and attraction in interpersonal relations-in Human-Robot Interaction. The experiment presented here involved 30 human observers who watched and rated 45 robotic gestures in terms of Big-Five personality traits and Godspeed scores. The results show that, for 24 of the 30 observers, there was a statistically significant correlation between the Godspeed scores and the perceived similarity between the robot's personality and their own. However, the association was positive for 15 subjectsmeaning that for these there is a similarity-attraction effectand negative for the other 9-meaning that for these there is a complementarity-attraction effect. Furthermore, the strength of the effect depends on the particular trait under examination.