Boxes with Personality

 Does personality buy you something with speaking devices?   With Robots?   Maybe, sometimes, in the right environment.  Its been tried many times.   Alexa does a bit, but not enough. A stronger conversational flow, with active memory would help.  Clear value goals.  Here an automated talking box on wheels from Norway makes the claim, for in hospital systems.  

An Automated Box on Wheels—with Personality   By Norwegian SciTech News   May 17, 2021

People find boxy talking robots humorous and engaging, which may make robotic technology more acceptable in everyday life, according to new research.

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) scientists studied robotic Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) deployed at St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway, which were equipped with voices with a distinctive local dialect, rather than a generic Norwegian voice.

NTNU's Roger A. Soraa said, "We found that these robots, which were not created to be social robots, were actually given social qualities by the humans relating to them."

Soraa said this quality helps people accept the robots, which he described as "emissaries of technologies."   ... 

This robot transports trolleys around St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. When people hear it speak, they perceive it as a kind of funny animal-like creature, rather than a robot.

From Norwegian SciTech News

AI Making Personality Distinctions via Images

Intriguing paper, but I have my doubts that you can determine useful personality distinctions this way.

Artificial intelligence can make personality judgments based on photographs
6 days ago

National Research University Higher School of Economics
Russian researchers from HSE University and Open University for the Humanities and Economics have demonstrated that artificial intelligence is able to infer people's personality from 'selfie' photographs better than human raters do. Conscientiousness emerged to be more easily recognizable than the other four traits. Personality predictions based on female faces appeared to be more reliable than those for male faces. The technology can be used to find the 'best matches' in customer service, dating or online tutoring.

The article, "Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images," will be published on May 22 in Scientific Reports.

Physiognomists from Ancient Greece to Cesare Lombroso have tried to link facial appearance to personality, but the majority of their ideas failed to withstand the scrutiny of modern science. The few established associations of specific facial features with personality traits, such as facial width-to-height ratio, are quite weak. Studies asking human raters to make personality judgments based on photographs have produced inconsistent results, suggesting that our judgments are too unreliable to be of any practical importance. ... 

Kachur, A., Osin, E., Davydov, D., Shutilov, K., & Novokshonov, A. (2020). Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images. Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65358-6

Can Personality Determine How we Interact with Future AI?

Very thoughtful piece in DSC.  I am suspicious of using the Myers-Briggs model here.  Read the complete article there, and join DSC for much more.

Could your personality decide how you can collaborate with AI in future jobs?
Posted by ajit jaokar in DSC

I am currently exploring this idea in a paper
Could your personality decide how you can collaborate with AI in future jobs?
I am a strong believer in a mode where humans and AI work together and collaborate 

I also believe that if we can master this skill, we can bring manufacturing jobs back from offshore destinations

In the book "Humans + Machines – Reinventing work in the age of AI": by Daugherty and Wilson (2018) propose a model for humans and AI working together based on the idea of identifying the ‘missing middle'. The missing middle represents areas where humans and AI collaborate and comprises of two sections:   Where humans complement machines and  where AI gives humans superpowers.   (Complete article at link) 

Personality Key for Open Source Contribution?

Depends if we can really detect useful personality measures of this type, and if they will be stable under differing contexts and goals.

Personality Key in Whether Developers Can Contribute to Open Source Projects
Waterloo News

The results of a study by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada suggest a software developer's personality could affect their ability to contribute to open source projects. Although social factors are the primary determinant of acceptance or rejection of online contributors' work, Waterloo's Meiyappan Nagappan said personality also is important to consider because it governs how contributors' behaviors manifest in their interactions with others. The researchers assessed data from the GitHub open source platform to analyze the personality traits of 16,935 active developers from 1,860 projects, and extracted the five leading developer personalities—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—with the IBM Watson Personality Insights service. Waterloo's Alex Yun said the analysis suggested that biases may be involved in the acceptance or rejection of contributions to work on open source platforms. Said Yun, "Managers are more likely to accept a contribution from someone they know, or someone more agreeable than others, even though the technical contribution might be similar."

Personality Detection by Autonomous Vehicles

More on personality determination to be used for autonomous vehicles.  Or any IOT device?  While it would appear this would be very useful, it leads to some kinds of private data, like behavioral personality, which could further be used to predict things that could be proxies for criminal behavior.

If I can quickly determine that a person drives erratically, say by observation, I would avoid them.  But I imagine this would likely be objected to as too deeply personal to be determined by an AI.   As we continue to do this kind of tagging with AI, expect more of this.

Predicting People's Driving Personalities
MIT News   By Adam Conner-Simons

A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed a system that classifies drivers' behavior, in order to determine whether autonomous vehicles (AVs) can be programmed to gauge other drivers' personalities in order to predict other vehicles' behaviors. The researchers employed social value orientation to quantify a person's selfishness or cooperativeness, and mapped out real-time driving trajectories for driverless vehicles based on that measurement. The researchers designed and tested an algorithm in scenarios of merging lanes and making unprotected left turns, and demonstrated that they could better predict other cars' behaviors. CSAIL's Wilko Schwarting said, "Creating more human-like behavior in autonomous vehicles (AVs) is fundamental for the safety of passengers and surrounding vehicles, since behaving in a predictable manner enables humans to understand and appropriately respond to the AV's actions."

Designing Robots with Personality

We always attribute a bit of personality into our devices,  but what amount and kind is useful for the best results, and minimal unintended consequences??

Character Engineer: Designing robots with a touch of personality.

So, Mark Palatucci EAS’00 wants to put a robot in every home.

That might sound familiar. After all, you may even already have one. But Palatucci, a cofounder of the San Francisco-based robotics company Anki, isn’t thinking about task-oriented automatons or self-directed vacuum cleaners. He’s not even thinking about smart speakers. He’s designing robots with “character”—enough to spark an emotional connection with their owners.

“People are much more willing to put a character in their home than they are just some smart cylinder or smart speaker that doesn’t have any emotion or character built around it,” he says. “It creates a sense of trust that a lot of other products don’t necessarily have.”

And if that trust leads to more engagement with the robot—whether it’s playing games with a robot called Cozmo, or getting Vector, another model, to take a picture when your hands are full—all the better.

Anki’s aim in building robots is to enable people to “build relationships with technology that feel a little more human.” Palatucci, who earned a computer science and engineering degree at Penn, is the company’s head of cloud artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their products have been getting notice. .... " 

Book on Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Though we used it a lot, were always warned it was only useful as a general view, and not to make decisions based on it.

Personality Puzzler: Is There Any Science Behind Myers-Briggs?

Author Merve Emre of Oxford University discusses her new book -- The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Training

Meyers Briggs book The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has been widely used by businesses, universities, the military and other organizations for decades to assess personality. But there is very little, if any, science behind it. Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and fellow at Worcester College, delves into the story behind the test with her new book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Training. Developed by a mother-daughter team with no psychological training, the Myers-Briggs test is supposed to indicate how people perceive and process the world around them. Emre recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to explain why the test continues to captivate our collective imagination as part of the $2 billion personality testing industry.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows. .... " 

Personality Classification

Been examining various personality classifiers, starting with a project we did with the Watson Bluemix system.  Here is another, covered in some detail in  Datanami:   Deep Learning Reveals New Insights About People:

" ... Can a computer detect an author’s personality type, based only on a sample of his or her writing? Four researchers from Singapore and Mexico City sought to answer that question.

In their newly published study, the authors present a deep learning-based method that can figure out the psychological profiles of authors. They used a specially designed deep convolutional neural network. Their method analyzed various texts in order to identify the presence or absence of the Big Five personality traits. The full paper can be found in IEEE Intelligent Systems, a peer-reviewed academic journal. .... " 

Paper abstract and full text access.

See personality tag below for previous coverage of this topic.

Personality Type for Entrepreneur

We used the Myers-Briggs  personality classification frequently in the enterprise to adjust writing and interaction.  But were carefully warned that it was NOT suitable for narrow classifications, or adapted classifications, or use for segmentation of consumers.   But now someone has decided that it is OK:

Myers-Briggs Just Discovered There Is a Personality Type for Entrepreneurs  By John Brandon 

" .... A new study completed this year shows that certain personality types are drawn to an entrepreneurial mindset. For the Myers-Briggs fans out there, you may already know the Intuition and Perceiving (N and P) personality types. The study found those folks have more of an entrepreneurial nature than the Sensing and Judging types.

From the study: "The entrepreneurs in the group showed a significantly higher orientation for creativity, risk-taking, impulsivity, and especially autonomy than did non-entrepreneurs. Competitive ambition did not distinguish between those who were or were not entrepreneurs, but did relate to those who saw themselves as more entrepreneurial. People with a preference for extraversion, intuition, thinking, and perceiving tended to show greater levels of entrepreneurial orientation." .... " 

Bot Personality Types

Something we looked at closely with our own Bot experiment.   Even thought of experimenting with adjusting the type online. But ended up with a friendly and humorous type.  Findings at the link are fairly obvious.   Depends too upon your goal.  Are you selling, convincing, informing, entertaining ... ? Location mentioned as key, below, but I doubt it.  Caution about how humor is taken should be careful.

Do You Prefer Your Customer Service Bots Friendly or Formal?
As robots increasingly replace human jobs, thanks to record spending on automation, how should they behave? That preference depends on where you live.

LivePerson, a company that works in automated customer service, recently surveyed 5,000 people on what personality types they prefer in customer service bots.   .... "

AI Resolving Customer Disputes

Note the use of personality profiles.  How accurately can this be done?

Can AI resolve customer service disputes?  by Matthew Stern  

A phone call with a customer service (CS) representative can devolve into a nightmare for any number of reasons. But to the extent that problems are caused by a particular customer and CS representative just not getting along, one startup aims to ease the tension with artificial intelligence (AI).

The startup, called Afiniti International Holdings, has created an AI-based system that builds a profile of a customer service caller based on aggregated information. When routing a call, it uses the profile to determine which customer service associate will most likely achieve a successful interaction, according to Engadget. ... " 

First Impressions: People, Brands?

Quite interesting results.  Does a lapse of time still not heal the first impression?    Is this also the case with a brand?

Science: First Impressions Are Even More Long-Lasting Than You Think
New research produces some bad news about how long awkward first encounters can linger.  By Jessica Stillman

Looking for Sarcasm

Have been looking at the general problem of how to detect demographic and personality indicators via twitter streams.  Here is an example described of detecting sarcasm . 

" ... Researchers at the University of Lisbon have developed a machine-learning system that can identify sarcasm on Twitter by examining a user's past tweets. The system uses the past tweets to develop a picture of a person that is detailed enough to guess when they are being sarcastic. The researchers say the system predicts sarcasm with an accuracy of 87 percent, which is slightly better than other existing methods. However, by learning to detect sarcasm without human input, the system should be easy to use. In addition, the new approach should work for any language and any online platform where posting history is available. "The key innovation is realizing you can build a model of the user merely based on what they have said in the past," says University of Lisbon researcher Silvio Amir. Monash University researcher Mark Carmen notes it should be straightforward to integrate the new approach with other types of social media analysis, such as tracking users' emotions or stock market trends. Analyzing sarcasm also could be a great help to marketers and customer service teams, as well as virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri. ...  "

See previous coverage of sarcasm below.

Watson Personality Insights

Just today I happened to be reintroduced to Personality Insights on the Watson Developer Cloud.  Had taken an earlier look.   Basic version is free to work with.   Can any provide me concrete examples of its use in the wild?   A personality classifier / transducer for the millions?   Marketing tool?  Python code connects .   " ...  Personality Insights extracts and analyzes a spectrum of personality attributes to help discover actionable insights about people and entities, and in turn guides end users to highly personalized interactions. The service outputs personality characteristics that are divided into three dimensions: the Big 5, Values, and Needs. While some services are contextually specific depending on the domain model and content, Personality Insights only requires a minimum of 3500+ words of any text. ... " 

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