Design of Social Features for Robot-mediated Cross-cultural Interaction

In this paper, we design a hierarchical set of socio-emotional features to understand the effect of cross-cultural mediation facilitated by a social robot between two remote groups of schoolchildren in Japan and in Australia. We also equip the robot with behaviors that maximize children's participation and stimulate socio-emotional interaction which in turn increases the chance of observing the designed features. Differences were observed between the cultures (AUS and JP), suggesting the need of future adaptation of the framework to different cultures as the pilot is expanded to more countries.