Nucleon Spin Structure with hadronic collisions at COMPASS

In order to illustrate the capabilities of COMPASS using a hadronic beam, I review some of the azimuthal asymmetries in hadronic collisions, that allow for the extraction of transversity, Sivers and Boer-Mulders functions, necessary to explore the partonic spin structure of the nucleon. I also report on some Monte Carlo simulations of such asymmetries for the production of Drell-Yan lepton pairs from the collision of high-energy pions on a transversely polarized proton target.Comment: talk delivered to the "International Workshop on Structure and Spectroscopy", Freiburg, March 19-21, 2007; 18 pages, RevTeX4 style, 8 figures with 10 .eps file

Social robots for older users: a possibility to support assessment and social interventions

In the last decades, various researches in the field of robotics have created numerous opportunities for innovative support of the older population. The goal of this work was to review and highlight how social robots can help the daily life of older people, and be useful also as assessment tools. We will underline the aspects of usability and acceptability of robotic supports in the psychosocial work with older persons. The actual usability of the system influences the perception of the ease of use only when the user has no or low experience, while expert users’ perception is related to their attitude towards the robot. This finding should be more deeply analysed because it may have a strong influence on the design of future interfaces for elderly-robot interaction. Robots can play an important role to tackle the societal challenge of the growing older population. The authors report some recent studies with older users, where it was demonstrated that the acceptability of robotics during daily life activities, and also in cognitive evaluation, could be supported by social robot

Cognitive robotics for the modelling of cognitive dysfunctions: A study on unilateral spatial neglect

© 2015 IEEE. Damage to the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) can cause patients to fail to orient toward, explore, and respond to stimuli on the contralesional side of the space. PPC is thought to play a crucial role in the computation of sensorimotor transformations that is in linking sensation to action. Indeed, this disorder, known as Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN), can compromise visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory modalities and may involve personal, extra-personal, and imaginal space [1], [2]. For this reason, USN describes a collection of behavioural symptoms in which patients appear to ignore, forget, or turn away from contralesional space [3]. Given the complexity of the disease and the difficulties to study human patients affected by USN, because of their impairments, several computer simulation studies were carried out via artificial neural networks in which damage to the connection weights was also found to yield neglect-related behaviour [4]-[6]

An explorative study on robotics for supporting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder during clinical procedures

This short report presents a small-scale explorative study about children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interaction with robots during clinical interactions. This is part of an ongoing project, which aims at defining a robotic service for supporting children with developmental disabilities and increase the efficiency of routine procedures that may create distress, e.g.having blood taken or an orthopaedic plaster cast applied. Five children with confirmed diagnoses of ASD interacted with two social robots: the small humanoid NAO and the pet-like MiRo. The encounters mixed play activities with a simulated clinical procedure. We included parents/carers in the interaction to ensure the child was comfortable and at ease. The results of video analysis and parents' feedback confirm possible benefits of the physical presence of robots to reduce children’s anxiety and increase compliance with instructions. Parents/carers convincingly support the introduction of robots in hospital procedures to their help children

Kindergarten Children Attitude Towards Humanoid Robots: what is the Effect of the First Experience?

Possible applications of robots are growing in educational contexts, where they can support and enhance the traditional learning at any level, including kindergarten. However, the acceptance of such novel technology among the kids is not fully understood, especially for the youngest ones. In this abstract, we present an experiment that investigates the attitude of 52 preschooler children before and after the interaction with a humanoid robot in kindergarten setting. The main hypothesis is that ideas and prejudices can change after a controlled interaction with a physical robot. The study found that children exposed to the robot decrease their distress and positively change their attitude toward the technological device. The results suggest that an early, controlled exposure may facilitate future acceptance

Affect Recognition in Autism: a single case study on integrating a humanoid robot in a standard therapy.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a multifaceted developmental disorder that comprises a mixture of social impairments, with deficits in many areas including the theory of mind, imitation, and communication. Moreover, people with autism have difficulty in recognising and understanding emotional expressions. We are currently working on integrating a humanoid robot within the standard clinical treatment offered to children with ASD to support the therapists. In this article, using the A-B-A' single case design, we propose a robot-assisted affect recognition training and to present the results on the child’s progress during the five months of clinical experimentation. In the investigation, we tested the generalization of learning and the long-term maintenance of new skills via the NEPSY-II affection recognition sub-test. The results of this single case study suggest the feasibility and effectiveness of using a humanoid robot to assist with emotion recognition training in children with ASD

Transverse-momentum distributions in a diquark spectator model

All the leading-twist parton distribution functions are calculated in a spectator model of the nucleon, using scalar and axial-vector diquarks. Single gluon rescattering is used to generate T-odd distribution functions. Different choices for the diquark polarization states are considered, as well as a few options for the form factor at the nucleon-quark-diquark vertex. The results are listed in analytic form and interpreted in terms of light-cone wave functions. The model parameters are fixed by reproducing the phenomenological parametrization of unpolarized and helicity parton distributions at the lowest available scale. Predictions for the other parton densities are given and, whenever possible, compared with available phenomenological parametrizations.Comment: 42 pages, 13 figures in .eps format. RevTeX style. Minor typos corrected, added one referenc

Usability Evaluation of a Robotic System for Cognitive Testing

This abstract presents a preliminary evaluation of the usability of a novel system for cognitive testing, which is based on the multimodal interfaces of the social robot “Pepper” and the IBM cloud AI “Watson”. Thirty-six participants experienced the system without assistance and filled the System Usability Scale questionnaire. Results show that the usability of the system is highly reliable

Adapting robot-assisted therapy of children with autism and different levels of intellectual disability

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disorder that requires personalising the treatment to the personal condition, in particular for individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID), which are the majority of those with ASD. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of our on-going research on personalised care for children with ASD and ID. The investigation focuses on integrating a social robot within the standard treatment in which tasks and level of interaction are adapted to the ID level of the individual and follow his progress after the rehabilitation

A comparison of kindergarten storytelling by human and humanoid robot with different social behavior

In this paper, we present a study on the influence of different social behavior on preschool children's perception of stories narrated either by a humanoid robot or by a human teacher. Four conditions were considered: static human, static robot, expressive human and expressive robot. Two stories, with knowledge and emotional content, were narrated in two different encounters. After each story, children draw what they remember of the story. We examined drawings of 81 children to study whether the sociability of the teacher (robot or human) could influence elements and details recorded. Results suggest a positive effect of the expressive behavior in robot storytelling, whose efficacy is comparable to the human with the same behavior or better if the expressive robot is compared with a static inexpressive human