arXiv subjects

Malte F. Jung

Publications and source records attributed to Malte F. Jung.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Individual-Targeting Assumption: A Systematic Review of Proactive Robots in Human Group Settings

Proactive robots are increasingly deployed in public environments where people are encountered not as isolated individuals but as members of cohesive social groups. Yet whether the prevailing design paradigm in proactive human-robot interaction (HRI) accounts for the relational structure that defines a group as a social unit remains largely unexamined. Through a systematic review of 63 proactive HRI studies in group settings from 2000 to 2025, we identify a recurring tendency, the Individual-Targeting Assumption (ITA), in which robots treat co-present people as independent engagement targets. We find that ITA is present in 60.3% of the corpus, with group-aware approaches emerging almost entirely after the robot is already embedded in an ongoing interaction. Critically, how a robot should detect and negotiate entry into a pre-formed group before initiating contact remains unaddressed across the corpus. Three failure modes, engagement misdetection, social ratification blindness, and bystander neglect, emerge as recurring patterns when proactive robots interact with human groups. These findings reframe proactive HRI in group settings not as an extension of dyadic interaction but as a qualitatively distinct design problem, and they identify the robot's approach to the group during the entry phase as a critical and understudied open challenge.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Inside Baseball: The Automated Ball-Strike System as an Object Lesson in Technological Rule Enforcement

Clearly-defined rules are often assumed to be straightforward to automate and evaluate. We challenge this assumption through an in-depth study of Major League Baseball's (MLB) seven-year experimentation with the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS). ABS is envisioned to call balls and strikes accurately: a seemingly straightforward use of technology to objectively determine the distance between a pitch and the strike zone. Although the strike zone is an area clearly defined in the rulebook, it took MLB seven years to figure out how to automate calling balls and strikes with ABS, showing how even seemingly straightforward rules require a complex translation process to operationalize via technological systems. In this paper, we trace the design decisions that led to the current implementation of ABS. Our case study reveals that "distance" exists even between a clear rule and its technological implementation. Using analytic frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we show that such distance exists because (1) historically, the "ground truth" of the strike zone is contested: the rule in practice has always reflected a hybrid between the rulebook definition and umpires' enforcement decisions; and (2) the use of ABS is embedded in an existing eco-system, where the implementation of a technological enforcement system needs to balance multiple stakeholder values. This perspective challenges conventional evaluation paradigms that center on the distance between a formalized rule and its technological implementation, and instead calls for evaluating how such systems are experienced in practice. Addressing this question requires in-depth social science approaches, contributing to ongoing conversations in FAccT about the implementation and evaluation of sociotechnical systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Theory of Mind in Robotics

Theory of Mind, the capacity to explain and predict behavior by inferring hidden mental states, has become the dominant paradigm for social interaction in robotics. Yet ToM rests on three assumptions that poorly capture how most social interaction actually unfolds: that meaning travels inside-out from hidden states to observable behavior; that understanding requires detached inference rather than participation; and that the meaning of behavior is fixed and available to a passive observer. Drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and participatory sense-making, I argue that social meaning is not decoded from behavior but produced through moment-to-moment coordination between agents. This interactional foundation has direct implications for robot design: shifting from internal state modeling toward policies for sustaining coordination, from observer-based inference toward active participation, and from fixed behavioral meaning toward meaning potential stabilized through response.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Understanding How Accessibility Practices Impact Teamwork in Mixed-Ability Teams that Collaborate Virtually

Virtual collaboration has transformed how people in mixed-ability teams, composed of disabled and non-disabled people, work together by offering greater flexibility. In these settings, accessibility practices, such as accommodations and inclusive norms, are essential for providing access to disabled people. However, we do not yet know how these practices shape broader facets of teamwork, such as productivity, participation, and camaraderie. To address this gap, we interviewed 18 participants (12 disabled, 6 non-disabled) who are part of mixed-ability teams. We found that beyond providing access, accessibility practices shaped how all participants coordinated tasks, sustained rapport, and negotiated responsibilities. Accessibility practices also introduced camaraderie challenges, such as balancing empathy and accountability. Non-disabled participants described allyship as a learning process and skill shaped by their disabled team members and team culture. Based on our findings, we present recommendations for team practices and design opportunities for virtual collaboration tools that reframe accessibility practices as a foundation for strong teamwork.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room

Designing robots to support high-stakes teamwork in emergency settings presents unique challenges, including seamless integration into fast-paced environments, facilitating effective communication among team members, and adapting to rapidly changing situations. While teleoperated robots have been successfully used in high-stakes domains such as firefighting and space exploration, autonomous robots that aid highs-takes teamwork remain underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a rapid prototyping process to develop a series of seemingly autonomous robot designed to assist clinical teams in the Emergency Room. We transformed a standard crash cart--which stores medical equipment and emergency supplies into a medical robotic crash cart (MCCR). The MCCR was evaluated through field deployments to assess its impact on team workload and usability, identified taxonomies of failure, and refined the MCCR in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Our work advances the understanding of robot design for high-stakes, time-sensitive settings, providing insights into useful MCCR capabilities and considerations for effective human-robot collaboration. By publicly disseminating our MCCR tutorial, we hope to encourage HRI researchers to explore the design of robots for high-stakes teamwork.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

What Could a Social Mediator Robot Do? Lessons from Real-World Mediation Scenarios

The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and experimental setups in controlled laboratory environments. To address complex social relationships in the real world, it is crucial to consider the actual needs and consequences of the situations found therein. This includes understanding when a mediator is necessary, what specific role such a robot could play, and how it moderates human social dynamics. In this paper, we discuss six relevant roles for robotic mediators that we identified by investigating a collection of videos showing realistic group situations. We further discuss mediation behaviors and target measures to evaluate the success of such interventions. We hope that our findings can inspire future research on robot-assisted social mediation by highlighting a wider set of mediation applications than those found in prior studies. Specifically, we aim to inform the categorization and selection of interaction scenarios that reflect real situations, where a mediation robot can have a positive and meaningful impact on group dynamics.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

Robot Assisted Tower Construction - A Resource Distribution Task to Study Human-Robot Collaboration and Interaction with Groups of People

Research on human-robot collaboration or human-robot teaming, has focused predominantly on understanding and enabling collaboration between a single robot and a single human. Extending human-robot collaboration research beyond the dyad, raises novel questions about how a robot should distribute resources among group members and about what the social and task related consequences of the distribution are. Methodological advances are needed to allow researchers to collect data about human robot collaboration that involves multiple people. This paper presents Tower Construction, a novel resource distribution task that allows researchers to examine collaboration between a robot and groups of people. By focusing on the question of whether and how a robot's distribution of resources (wooden blocks required for a building task) affects collaboration dynamics and outcomes, we provide a case of how this task can be applied in a laboratory study with 124 participants to collect data about human robot collaboration that involves multiple humans. We highlight the kinds of insights the task can yield. In particular we find that the distribution of resources affects perceptions of performance, and interpersonal dynamics between human team-members.

cs.RO↗