With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a powerful role in regulating behaviours, emotions, and even health. If this is to extend to human-robot dyads, the phenomenology of such relationships (including their emergence and stability) must be better understood. In this paper, we discuss potential approaches towards operationalizing the phenomenon of social bonding between human-robot dyads. We will discuss a number of biobehavioural proxies of social bonding, moving away from existing approaches that use subjective, psychological measures, and instead grounding our approach in some of the evolutionary, neurobiological and physiological correlates of social bond formation in natural systems: (a) reductions in physiological stress (the ''social buffering'' phenomenon), (b) narrowing of spatial proximity between dyads, and (c) inter-dyad behavioural synchrony. We provide relevant evolutionary support for each proposed component, with suggestions and considerations for how they can be recorded in (real-time) human-robot interaction scenarios. With this, we aim to inspire more robust operationalisation of ''social bonding'' between human and artificial (robotic) agents.

In this interview with BCG, McAfee focuses on "machine," the rise of artificial intelligence. McAfee is a big booster of most things digital, but he's also a realist. He cautions, for example, that an AI engine is only as good as the data fed into it. Machines are still a long way from mastering many human tasks, and the biggest impediment to machine learning and other AI tools may be the imagination of business leaders. But he's not worried about tech giants cornering the AI market, and he's relatively sanguine about an automated economy in which many forms of work have disappeared.

How did you decide who you're spending your life with: your partner, your friends, colleagues? If you're like most people, you probably trusted your gut. But as everyone who's broken up with a lover, let a friendship fade, or quit a job because of their boss, our stomach sometimes leads us astray. We frown at the idea of objectively evaluating a husband, friend, or work buddy, but these incredibly complex decisions are among the most important we ever make. These people -- our community -- are, literally life-saving, as we get older.

Recent research suggests that, as in offline scenarios, spatial proximity increases the likelihood that two individuals establish an online social connection, and geographic closeness could therefore influence the formation of online communities. In this work we present a study of communities in two online social networks with location-sharing features and analyze their social and spatial properties. We study the places users visit to understand whether communities revolve around places or whether they exist independently. Our results suggest that community structure in social networks may arise from both social and spatial factors, so that exploiting information about the places where people go could benefit the definition of new community detection methods and community evolution models.