Andreas Bischof

Posts Tagged ‘Andreas Bischof’

Dissertation project on Social Robotics gains attention

November 20, 2017 by Andreas Bischof in Publications

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Dr. Andreas Bischof (3rd from right) awarded with the prize for an excellent dissertation on communication. One of the first congratulators was Dr. Eberhard Alles (right), Chancellor of the TU Chemnitz. Copyright: Dresdner Gesprächskreis

During his time as a CrossWorlds PhD-student Andreas Bischof conducted ethnographic research in social robotics labs around the world. The sociologist was eagerly interested to find out, how engineers and computer scientists make robots for everyday worlds ‘social’. His participant observations in human-robot interaction resulted in a study reconstructing the social conditions of social robotics and the practices within this field of research and development.

Bischof’s thesis, which he defended last year, and the following book »Soziale Maschinen bauen« are recently receiving great interest. After being awarded with the dissertation prize of the “Commerzbank AG Niederlassung Chemnitz”, the “Dresdner Gesprächskreis der Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft” awarded one of his annual prizes for outstanding young scientists last thursday.

One week earlier, the national daily newspaper F.A.Z. recognized his study as “realistic and reflected look behind the scenes” of human-robot interaction. The science journalist Dr. Manuela Lenzen wrote: “Bischof rightly raises the question of whether the design of the robots, which are supposed to live with us, can be left to such pragmatism. If tasks are broken down into technically manageable parts, the social aspects of social robotics could become shortened to an optimazation problem.” (F.A.Z., 11/11/2017, PayWall)

Andreas Bischof wrote his dissertation at the Chair of Media Communication, where he was supervised by Prof. Dr. Claudia Fraas. Today, Bischof is a member of the junior research group “Miteinander” at the Faculty of Computer Science.

EASST’14 – Talk on Robots in Elder Care

October 8, 2014 by Andreas Bischof in Conferences

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Statue of Nicolaus Copernicus in Torun, Poland. (c) Bischof

CrossWorlds assistant researcher Andreas Bischof has been attending EASST’14, europe’s most important conference on science and technlogy studies (STS).

The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) has – like the field itself – geographical centres of gravitation in Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The organisation seeks to overcome this historic bias by allocating its bi-anual meetings in south and east european countries. The 2014 conference took place in Torun / Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus’ birth place! (Which is more than funny since Copernicus is the title hero of a very important study that kind of founded science and technology research, Thomas Kuhns »Copernican Revolution«.

Andreas’ talk was part of the panel »Governing Health Care Technologies«. Demographic ageing is widely seen as a “grand challenge”, and policy makers, industry, academic researchers, health care providers, and lobby groups have identified research and innovation as a promising response. In this context Andreas’ talk »Two Ways of Co-Constructing the User in Social Robotics« contributed to the discussion of practices of user-producer interactions in social robotics projects for elderly.

In particular he compared two projects implementing assistive robots in elder care in west european country. The question was how these projects integrated the elderly in the research & development of their robots. Crucial therefore are obviously user tests and the function of the thereby gathered data in the research process. The empirical research in the projects shows that institutional and political implications of the research shape the image of the user in such projects far more than actual user needs. Please have a look at the slides for details. For a more detailed insight see the German blog post from Andreas on his personal blog.

DFG – Terra Digitalis

May 12, 2014 by Madlen Wuttke in General

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Three teams of the CrossWorlds research group were chosen by the DFG for being advertised on the Terra Digitalis Website, which is now online – check it out!

Please scroll down on the page to make your balloon travel across the Terra Digitalis. Or simply click on these links to get to the CrossWorlds projects immediately:

Anke Tallig & Andreas Bischof
Kalja Kanellopoulos & Michael Storz
Madlen Wuttke & Kai-Uwe Martin

Robotics Going Beyond the Laboratory

February 24, 2014 by Andreas Bischof in Conferences

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“Robokid” graphic by Ilona Straub to illustrate the programme.

To face dynamic environments and everyday situations is currently the biggest challenge for robotics. As part of their research project on the development of service robotics in Japan and Europe the sociologists Gesa Lindemann, Gregor Fitzi, Hironori Matsuzaki and Ilona Straub invited both robotic scientists and social scientists to discuss the implications and challenges of the goal to take robots beyond the laboratory.

Our fellow Andreas Bischof had the chance to present the outlines of his reserach question in analyzing social robotics to this very instructive conference. The greatest effort of GBTL conference was to bring together researchers with different perspectives on robotics, what is unfortunately rather rare in this context. HRI specialists like Morana Ala? or Selma Šabanovi? met german sociologists like Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer and Martin Meister. Legal [1, 2] and philosphical positions met famous robotic engineers, like Prof. Takanishi from Waseda University. It’s worth to have a look for upcoming publications from the organizing group of University of Oldenburg.

Mensch und Computer 2013

September 20, 2013 by Andreas Bischof in Conferences

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This years edition of Germany’s primary conference on human computer interaction “Mensch und Computer” took place in bremen with high involvement of CrossWorlds’ researchers. Since the conference character emphasizes interdisciplinary exchange between academics, practioners, computer scientists, UX designers and social sientists several of our research fellows participated actively in the event.

Andreas Bischof and Benny Liebold organized a workshop on methodological approaches to HCI, where Kalja Kanellopoulos and Michael Storz presented their multitouch table for multiple users (Kanellopoulos, Storz 2013, in press). A very interesting discussion about the outlines of a possible mutual methodology for both computer scientists and designers / social scientists was initiated by Michael Heidt‘s talk (Heidt 2013, in press). The main talking points can be understood in two (german-language) blog posts. One is pointing out the question, how qualitative data and results can be communicated more compatible for HCI projects, the other sums up a discussion on interdisciplinary communication around code between computer scientists. A literally visionary (and entertaining) submission from TU Chemnitz researchers beyond that was the visual computing group‘s video on a possible HCI avatar tool in the shape of cuddly toys.