When people hear the words "social engineering," they usually think of the supposed nefarious designs of government or an opposing political party. These days, there's a general sense of social upheaval brought on by some invisible force, and we're anxious to blame someone. I can't help feeling that, to some extent, we're tilting at windmills while the real source of social engineering is in our pockets, on our laps, in a myriad of devices and soon, highly lifelike social robots for the home. The future is coming at us fast these days. In October 2023, Boston Dynamics, the robotics company that makes advanced robots that can dance better than some people, announced it had endowed Spot, its highly utilitarian doglike robot, with ChatGPT.

There is a major lack of diversity in engineering, technology, and computing subjects in higher education. The resulting underrepresentation of some population groups contributes largely to gender and ethnicity pay gaps and social disadvantages. We aim to increase the diversity among students in such subjects by investigating the use of interactive robots as a tool that can get prospective students from different backgrounds interested in robotics as their field of study. For that, we will survey existing solutions that have proven to be successful in engaging underrepresented groups with technical subjects in educational settings. Moreover, we examine two recent outreach events at the University of Hertfordshire against inclusivity criteria. Based on that, we suggest specific activities for higher education institutions that follow an inclusive approach using interactive robots to attract prospective students at open days and other outreach events. Our suggestions provide tangible actions that can be easily implemented by higher education institutions to make technical subjects more appealing to everyone and thereby tackle inequalities in student uptake.

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies considered a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, healthcare professionals perform the task bimanually. Inspired by them, we propose a bimanual cooperative scheme for robotic dressing assistance. In the scheme, an interactive robot joins hands with the human thus supporting/guiding the human in the dressing process, while the dressing robot performs the dressing task. We identify a key feature that affects the dressing action and propose an optimal strategy for the interactive robot using the feature. A dressing coordinate based on the posture of the arm is defined to better encode the dressing policy. We validate the interactive dressing scheme with extensive experiments and also an ablation study. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/bimanualassitdressing/home

China-based Terminus Technologies will deploy more than 150 interactive robots when Expo 2020 opens doors next year. Visitors will be greeted and be able to interact with Opti, one of the Expo 2020 robot mascots from Terminus, and will also provide visitor assistance as well as helping with food and beverage delivery and hospitality services. Expo 2020 Dubai will run from October 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. After signing in as Expo 2020 Dubai's Official Robotics Partner, Victor Ai, Founder and CEO, Terminus Technologies, said that they will set up its first headquarters outside of China as well as a research and development centre at District 2020, the human-centric smart city that will repurpose post Expo. "Expo 2020 Dubai will serve as an incredible hub of innovation for the world, and District 2020 will act as an example for global smart city development. Terminus is working with both to redefine the concept of future cities with our leading robotics, AI and IoT technology," he said.

Samantha the Sex Doll is a £3,000 interactive robot designed with one specific purpose: pleasure. She is the latest development in a growing trend in Austria which has seen brothel customers preferring robots over sexual intercourse with a human. During a display at the Ars Electronica Festival in the city of Linz, Samantha shows off her'skills', which include reacting to touch, hugging and moaning - and remembering individuals she has'interacted' with. During a display at the Ars Electronica Festival in the city of Linz, Samantha shows off her'skills', which include reacting to touch, hugging and moaning - and remembering individuals she has'interacted' with The robot doll's developer Sergi Santos says Samantha can remember someone she has interacted with in the past, as she communicates according to the way she was treated by them before. The robot reacts to touch, speaks multiple languages and is even said to be able to learn new things thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) software.

TheCorpora S.L. is a robotics and artificial intelligence company based in Barcelona, Spain. Founded 10 years ago when the company recognized a market opportunity to create low cost, open source interactive robots, Q.bo was the team's first product. Developed and built from scratch, Q.bo has now been shipped to hundreds of customers, including a number of universities and multinational technology companies. Q.bo's success as a research platform has been driving the team to design the next generation product. Based on input through the Internet of Things and feedback from user experiences, TheCorpora team is getting closer to achieving their goal to produce a mass marketable product in the near future.

How do you make a robot toy that's both interesting and affordable? It's a hard problem: Making an interesting robot means giving it intelligence and creative autonomy, and giving a robot intelligence and creative autonomy is generally not compatible with it also being cheap. At CES a few weeks ago, we were introduced to Bots_Alive, a small company of roboticists who have managed to develop a robotic critter with a carefully thought-out animal-like personality. And by hacking an existing robot toy and using your phone as a brain, they're ready to sell it to you for 35 bucks. Bots_Alive is, essentially, selling a replacement brain for Hexbug Spider robots.

Android applications have been built that entertain us, connect us with one another, organize our lives, and much more. Pepper is a humanoid robot from SoftBank Robotics, and in this session, engineers from SoftBank Robotics will explore the capabilities, practicalities and opportunities of this exciting development landscape. Developers will gain insights into writing interactive applications for Pepper, from creating custom animations to specialized dialogue sequences. Attendees will even get to see Pepper in action. See all the talks from Google I/O 2016 here: https://goo.gl/olw6kV

Now, who on earth is Jia Jia? Does she sound like a Chinese? But not human, though she is human-like. She is a realistic-looking robot, or the robot goddess, who took three years to get created. She is part of the amazing robot industry that is continuously working on robotic products.

The University of Science and Technology of China on Friday officially launched the robot "Jiajia" it invented for interactive experience. HEFEI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A new interactive robot, named Jia Jia, was unveiled Friday by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province. Welcome!" the eye-catching robot said as it greeted the audience at the university's multi-media center. "Don't come too close to me when you are taking a picture. It will make my face look fat," Jia Jia said. Jia Jia was developed by a robot research and development team at the USTC, which also developed the model service robot "Kejia." It took the team three years to research and develop this new-generation interactive robot, which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips, and move its body, according to team director Chen Xiaoping. Compared to previous interactive robots, Jia Jia's eyeballs roll naturally and its speech is in sync with its lip movements, in addition to her human-like form, Chen said. Jia Jia can not cry or laugh and these are areas to be developed, Chen added. "We hope to develop the robot so it has deep learning abilities.