In the future, robots will become our companions and co-workers. They will gradually appear in our environment, to help elderly or disabled people or to perform repetitive or unsafe tasks. However, we are still far from a real autonomous robot, which would be able to act in a natural, efficient and secure manner with humans. To endow robots with the capacity to act naturally with human, it is important to study, first, how humans act together. Consequently, this manuscript starts with a state of the art on joint action in psychology and philosophy before presenting the implementation of the principles gained from this study to human-robot joint action. We will then describe the supervision module for human-robot interaction developed during the thesis. Part of the work presented in this manuscript concerns the management of what we call a shared plan. Here, a shared plan is a a partially ordered set of actions to be performed by humans and/or the robot for the purpose of achieving a given goal. First, we present how the robot estimates the beliefs of its humans partners concerning the shared plan (called mental states) and how it takes these mental states into account during shared plan execution. It allows it to be able to communicate in a clever way about the potential divergent beliefs between the robot and the humans knowledge. Second, we present the abstraction of the shared plans and the postponing of some decisions. Indeed, in previous works, the robot took all decisions at planning time (who should perform which action, which object to use…) which could be perceived as unnatural by the human during execution as it imposes a solution preferentially to any other. This work allows us to endow the robot with the capacity to identify which decisions can be postponed to execution time and to take the right decision according to the human behavior in order to get a fluent and natural robot behavior. The complete system of shared plans management has been evaluated in simulation and with real robots in the context of a user study. Thereafter, we present our work concerning the non-verbal communication needed for human-robot joint action. This work is here focused on how to manage the robot head, which allows to transmit information concerning what the robot's activity and what it understands of the human actions, as well as coordination signals. Finally, we present how to mix planning and learning in order to allow the robot to be more efficient during its decision process. The idea, inspired from neuroscience studies, is to limit the use of planning (which is adapted to the human-aware context but costly) by letting the learning module made the choices when the robot is in a "known" situation. The first obtained results demonstrate the potential interest of the proposed solution.

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Technological advancements have resulted in highly automated systems that are featured in many kinds of tools and devices, such as self-driving cars, autopilot in airplanes, and much more. Such systems have enabled tools to plan, decide, and act autonomously. This breakthrough resulted in a new manner of interacting with tools, known as "Human-Robot Joint Action" or "human-AI interaction," in which people and automated tools share control over the tasks that must be performed. However, little is known about the impact of such interactions on people and their sense of agency (SoA) as well as how much autonomy to grant to tools. As a result, the objective of this systematic review is to investigate and understand how automated tools affect human SoA, and if tools with different levels of automation affect our SoA differently. A search in two databases, Scopus, and MEDLINE EBSCO was conducted, and 8 articles were included. The findings suggest that the more automated the tool is, the less SoA participants experience, and that varied levels of automation may impact human SoA depending on the nature of the task. However, this topic is still in its infancy and more research is needed.

The purpose of this research was to study customer-supplier relationships, and particularly their partnerships, to help managers and practitioners successfully design, develop, implement and deploy tools and joint practices for their upstream systems. To achieve this purpose, a total of 1,811 (potential mailed survey questionnaire respondents) and 7 (structured interviewees) managers who are responsible for purchasing, sales/ marketing, quality-related, and production- or operations-related functions of U.S. private manufacturing companies in SIC 35, 36, and 37 were used to collect qualitative and quantitative data. Using 172 usable mailed survey questionnaire responses (response rate: 9.78%) and qualitative data from the structured interviews, the following major findings were derived: • Four tools/joint practices most frequently used in customer-supplier relationships were supplier certification/verification, joint problem-solving teams, quality audits, and Just-In-Time production and delivery, • Five tools/joint practices that have been used most effectively were ISO 9000 and/or QS 9000 and/or Baldrige criteria, quality audit, JIT production/delivery, joint planning, and joint problem-solving teams, • Five tools/joint practices that have been most internalized were ISO 9000 and/or QS 9000 and/or Baldrige criteria, quality audit, JIT production/delivery, joint problem-solving teams, and supplier or customer performance measurement systems, • Overall perceived organizational performance improvement was 25% (30% quality improvement, 21% cost reduction, and 26% cycle time reduction). In addition to these findings, eight hypothesized relationships were tested using two independent variables (joint use of specific tools and joint use of practices) and four dependent variables (informed partners, role integrity, conflict resolution, and mutuality). The results showed that customer and supplier companies do not share the same experience with respect to the relationships between the two independent variables and conflict resolution. Using these findings, a set of practices was proposed as a means for further improving specific organizational performance dimensions and providing a mechanism to better share the consequences of joint action. / Ph. D.

No abstract / Mini Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Private Law / LLM / Unrestricted

Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known prior intentions (plans) that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively unexplored in the philosophical literature. The first lacuna concerns how to make sense of the apparently joint cooperative activities of agents that lack the capacities for planning and “mindreading” that one must have in order to be a party to a shared intention (consider, for example, the social play of young children or the cooperative hunting of non-human primates or social carnivores). The second lacuna concerns how participants (including adult human agents) are able to coordinate their actions “online”—that is, during action execution as a joint activity unfolds—without recourse to plans that specify in advance what they should do (consider the coordination involved when two friends meet and do a “high five”). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the first lacuna, while chapters 4 and 5 focus on the second. In chapter 2, I focus on why participants must have mutual or common knowledge of each other’s intentions and beliefs in order to have a shared intention: Why must these attitudes be “out in the open”? I argue that, if participants lack the concept of belief, then one of the two main motivations for the common knowledge requirement—to filter out certain cases that intuitively aren’t cases of genuine joint activity—actually dissipates. Furthermore, a kind of “openness” that only requires of participants that they have the concept of goal but not that of belief can satisfy the other main motivation, to make sense of the idea that joint activities are non-accidentally coordinated. In chapter 3, I offer an account of a kind of joint activity in which agents such as young children and some non-human primates could participate, given what we know about their socio-cognitive capacities. In chapter 4, I argue that ‘shared intention’-accounts are unable to say much about spontaneous or skilful joint action because of the following widely accepted constraint on what one can intend: while an agent might intend—in the sense of commit to a plan—that “we” do something together, an agent cannot intend to perform “our” joint action. I reject this constraint and argue that some joint actions (such as a joint manoeuvre performed by two figure skaters) are joint in virtue of each participant having what I call ‘socially extended intention-in-action’ that overlap. In chapter 5, I review empirical work on subpersonal enabling mechanisms for the coordination of joint action. The review provides clues to what it is that enables participants to successfully coordinate their actions in the absence of plan-like intentions or beyond what such intentions specify. While what I address are lacunas rather than problems, an upshot of this thesis is that leading philosophical accounts of joint activity may have less explanatory scope than one might otherwise be led to believe. The accounts of joint activity and joint action that are presented in this thesis are arguably applicable to many of the joint activities and joint actions of adult human beings. The account also helps us avoid the false dichotomy between a very robust form of joint activity and a mere concatenation of purely individualistic actions—a dichotomy that accounts such as Bratman’s arguably invite us to adopt.

When interacting, people imitate each other. This tendency is truly ubiquitous and occurs in many different situations and behaviours. But what causes it? Several mechanisms have been proposed to contribute to imitation. In this thesis, I focus on three candidate mechanisms: simulation, temporal adaptation, and the goal to affiliate with others. I start by discussing different imitative behaviours, and reviewing the evidence that imitation might at times emerge spontaneously. I also review the evidence suggesting that the three candidate mechanisms might be involved in such emergent imitation. Then, I present three sets of experiments. In the first set, I investigate the role of simulation in language processing. In three experiments, I test the hypothesis that comprehenders use their language production system to simulate their interlocutor, which in turn facilitates their ability to predict the next word they will see or hear. I manipulate whether participants read the sentences silently or aloud and measure their ability to predict the final word of a sentence. My results demonstrate that prediction is enhanced when people use their production system during reading aloud. This gives some credence to the idea that simulation is routinely engaged in language processing, which in turn opens up a possibility that it may contribute to linguistic imitation. In the second set of experiments, I investigate whether temporal adaptation leads agents to imitate features of their partner’s actions. In three experiments, I test this by manipulating the partner’s response speed and the information about the partner’s actions. I show that agents imitate response speed when they are able to observe the partner. Moreover, they adapt to the specific temporal pattern of their partner’s actions. These findings provide evidence for the engagement of the temporal adaptation mechanism during motor interactions, and for its involvement in imitation. In the third set of experiments, I turn to the hypothesis that people engage in linguistic imitation because they want to harness the social benefits it brings. I investigate a key assumption of this hypothesis: that imitation has positive consequences for the social interaction. In three experiments, I manipulate whether participants’ word choice is imitated or counter-imitated by their conversational partner and measure how it affects the participants’ evaluation of the interaction and the partner, and their willingness to cooperate with the partner. I find evidence that linguistic imitation has positive social consequences. These results are consonant with the claim that imitation is motivated by the goal to affiliate and foster social relations. Taken together, these findings suggest that imitation might occur both in motor actions and language, and that it might have diverse causes. My work on language suggests that the tendency to linguistically imitate others could both result from the simulation mechanism, and be motivated by the goal to affiliate. My work on motor actions shows that automatic temporal adaptation contributes to emergent imitation during interactions. This research is conducive to the greater aim of cross-examining the currently known mechanisms of imitation.

The aim of this dissertation is to define and account for experiences of musical connectivity by exploring the relationship between joint musical action and social experience through a combination of ethnographic and empirical methods. Live sitar and tabla duo performance, in the Hindustānī tradition, forms the focus of the studies. Through its approach and scope, this research contributes to a broadening of knowledge and understanding of how people play music together, and experience varying feelings of 'togetherness' while doing so, from an interdisciplinary, non- Western perspective. The dissertation first considers the various musical and social concepts and behaviours that characterize Hindustānī performance. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of a commercial recording by master musicians Pt. Nikhil Banerjee and Zamir Ahmed Khan, in which the formal, rhythmic, and micro-temporal interactions are explored from a relational, socially-driven perspective. Lastly, qualitative and quantitative data collected through a case study carried out in Varanasi, India, involving close collaboration with expert informants Shyam Rastogi (sitar) and Sandeep Rao (tabla) together with the participation of five other local musicians are presented and discussed. Nine audio-visual performances were recorded, and performers were subsequently interviewed regarding aspects of their social experience whilst playing. Performances were then analysed in order to relate performers' musical interactions with their self-reported feelings of sociality, both generally and at specific moments of their performance. These various results are used to support a novel model of musical connectivity, based on (i) ethnographic insight gathered through fieldwork, (ii) formal and informal interviews with numerous Indian musicians, and (iii) the author's auto-ethnographic account of his practice as a sitar student. This model and the phenomenological insights that it presents are explored in detail in the concluding chapter.

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