The rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI) will increase opportunities for humans and AI-driven technology to collaborate as teammates. This requires both partners to learn from interactions about the task, each other and the team (co-learning). Co-learning can be supported by enabling partners to share knowledge and experiences on the task and team level. This paper first analyzes the requirements regarding tasks and environments for co-learning. These requirements were subsequently implemented in a testbed: a human and intelligent robot jointly conducting an urban search and rescue task in a simplified task environment. We designed Learning Design Patterns (LDPs): interaction sequences intended to initiate and facilitate co-learning. Effects of LDPs on collaboration, knowledge and understanding, and team performance were experimentally evaluated using the testbed. In comparison to a previous study, participants appreciated the robot more, had more interaction and displayed more commitment. Results show evidence that the LDPs, in comparison with no interventions, initiated and improved learning of the human team member, in particular on knowledge development and understanding the partner. Better knowledge and understanding did, however, not also lead to better team performance. Implications for co-learning in human-AI teams and for learning-supporting interventions are discussed.

Despite a large body of research on robot learning, it has not yet been thoroughly studied how collaborating humans and robots learn reciprocally. In such situations, both humans and robots continuously learn about each other and the task through interaction. This letter addresses the research question: "How can human-robot co-learning be facilitated in physically embodied collaborative tasks?". First, we derived five requirements for successful human-robot co-learning from literature: shared goal, synchrony, interdependence, adaptability, and transparency. Based on these requirements, we designed a collaborative human-robot handover task and a robot Q-learning method. In an evaluation with six human participants co-learning was indeed found to emerge in the hand-over task. Particularly, for three of the human-robot dyads, our designed setup proved to facilitate co-learning in a way that met all five requirements. The task and robot learning method presented in this letter demonstrate how human-robot co-learning can be enabled in physically embodied tasks.

When humans and AI-agents collaborate, they need to continuously learn about each other and the task. We propose a Team Design Pattern that utilizes adaptivity in the behavior of human and agent team partners, causing new Collaboration Patterns to emerge. Human-AI Co-Learning takes place when partners can formalize recognized patterns of collaboration in a commonly shared language, and can communicate with each other about these patterns. For this, we developed an ontology of Collaboration Patterns. An accompanying Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables partners to formalize and refine Collaboration Patterns, which can then be communicated to the partner. The ontology was evaluated empirically with human participants who viewed video recordings of joint human-agent activities. Participants were requested to identify Collaboration Patterns in the footage, and to formalize patterns by using the ontology’s GUI. Results show that the ontology supports humans to recognize and define Collaboration Patterns successfully. To improve the ontology, it is suggested to include pre- and post-conditions of tasks, as well as parallel actions of team members.

With artificial intelligence (AI) systems entering our working and leisure environments with increasing adaptation and learning capabilities, new opportunities arise for developing hybrid (human-AI) intelligence (HI) systems, comprising new ways of collaboration. However, there is not yet a structured way of specifying design solutions of collaboration for hybrid intelligence (HI) systems and there is a lack of best practices shared across application domains. We address this gap by investigating the generalization of specific design solutions into design patterns that can be shared and applied in different contexts. We present a human-centered bottom-up approach for the specification of design solutions and their abstraction into team design patterns. We apply the proposed approach for 4 concrete HI use cases and show the successful extraction of team design patterns that are generalizable, providing re-usable design components across various domains. This work advances previous research on team design patterns and designing applications of HI systems.

The rapid advancement of technology empowered by artificial intelligence is believed to intensify the collaboration between humans and AI as team partners. Successful collaboration requires partners to learn about each other and about the task. This human-AI co-learning can be achieved by presenting situations that enable partners to share knowledge and experiences. In this paper we describe the development and implementation of a task context and procedures for studying co-learning. More specifically, we designed specific sequences of interactions that aim to initiate and facilitate the co-learning process. The effects of these interventions on learning were evaluated in an experiment, using a simplified virtual urban-search-and-rescue task for a human-robot team. The human participants performed a victim rescue- and evacuation mission in collaboration with a wizard-of-Oz (i.e., a confederate of the experimenter who executed the robot-behavior consistent with an ontology-based AI-model). The designed interaction sequences, formulated as Learning Design Patterns (LDPs), were intended to bring about co-learning. Results show that LDPs support the humans understanding and awareness of their robot partner and of the teamwork. No effects were found on collaboration fluency, nor on team performance. Results are used to discuss the importance of co-learning, the challenges of designing human-AI team tasks for research into this phenomenon, and the conditions under which co-learning is likely to be successful. The study contributes to our understanding of how humans learn with and from AI-partners, and our propositions for designing intentional learning (LDPs) provide directions for applications in future human-AI teams.

The goal of the FATE system is decision support with use of state-of-the-art human-AI co-learning, explainable AI and fair, secure and privacy-preserving usage of data. This AI-based support system is a general system, in which the modules can be tuned to specific use cases. The FATE system is designed to address different user roles, such as a researcher, domain expert/consultant and subject/patient, each with their own requirements. Having examined a Diabetes Type 2 use case before, in this paper we slightly iterate the FATE system and focus on a juridical use case. For a given new juridical case the relevant older court cases are suggested by the system. The relevant older cases can be explained using the eXplainable AI (XAI) module, and the system can be improved based on feedback about the relevant cases using the Co-learning module through interaction with a user. In the Bias module, the use of the system is investigated for potential bias by inspecting the properties of suggested cases. Secure Learning offers privacy-by-design alternatives for functionality found in the aforementioned modules. These results show how the generic FATE system can be implemented in a number of real-world use cases. In future work we plan to explore more use cases within this system.

Becoming a well-functioning team requires continuous collaborative learning by all team members. This is called co-learning, conceptualized in this paper as comprising two alternating iterative stages: partners adapting their behavior to the task and to each other (co-adaptation), and partners sustaining successful behavior through communication. This paper focuses on the first stage in human-robot teams, aiming at a method for the identification of recurring behaviors that indicate co-learning. Studying this requires a task context that allows for behavioral adaptation to emerge from the interactions between human and robot. We address the requirements for conducting research into co-adaptation by a human-robot team, and designed a simplified computer simulation of an urban search and rescue task accordingly. A human participant and a virtual robot were instructed to discover how to collaboratively free victims from the rubbles of an earthquake. The virtual robot was designed to be able to real-time learn which actions best contributed to good team performance. The interactions between human participants and robots were recorded. The observations revealed patterns of interaction used by human and robot in order to adapt their behavior to the task and to one another. Results therefore show that our task environment enables us to study co-learning, and suggest that more participant adaptation improved robot learning and thus team level learning. The identified interaction patterns can emerge in similar task contexts, forming a first description and analysis method for co-learning. Moreover, the identification of interaction patterns support awareness among team members, providing the foundation for human-robot communication about the co-adaptation (i.e., the second stage of co-learning). Future research will focus on these human-robot communication processes for co-learning.

As robots become more ubiquitous, they will increasingly need to behave as our team partners and smoothly adapt to the (adaptive) human team behaviors to establish successful patterns of collaboration over time. A substantial amount of adaptations present themselves through subtle and unconscious interactions, which are difficult to observe. Our research aims to bring about awareness of co-adaptation that enables team learning. This paper presents an experimental paradigm that uses a physical human-robot collaborative task environment to explore emergent human-robot co-adaptions and derive the interaction patterns (i.e., the targeted awareness of co-adaptation). The paradigm provides a tangible human-robot interaction (i.e., a leash) that facilitates the expression of unconscious adaptations, such as “leading” (e.g., pulling the leash) and “following” (e.g., letting go of the leash) in a search-and-navigation task. The task was executed by 18 participants, after which we systematically annotated videos of their behavior. We discovered that their interactions could be described by four types of adaptive interactions: stable situations, sudden adaptations, gradual adaptations and active negotiations. From these types of interactions we have created a language of interaction patterns that can be used to describe tacit co-adaptation in human-robot collaborative contexts. This language can be used to enable communication between collaborating humans and robots in future studies, to let them share what they learned and support them in becoming aware of their implicit adaptations.

A team develops competency by progressive mutual adaptation and learning, a process we call co-learning. In human teams, partners naturally adapt to each other and learn while collaborating. This is not self-evident in human-robot teams. There is a need for methods and models for describing and enabling co-learning in human-robot partnerships. The presented project aims to study human-robot co-learning as a process that stimulates fluent collaborations. First, it is studied how interactions develop in a context where a human and a robot both have to implicitly adapt to each other and have to learn a task to improve the collaboration and performance. The observed interaction patterns and learning outcomes will be used to (1) investigate how to design learning interactions that support human-robot teams to sustain implicitly learned behavior over time and context, and (2) to develop a mental model of the learning human partner, to investigate whether this supports the robot in its own learning as well as in adapting effectively to the human partner.

Design cards are a popular way for designers to encode and communicate design knowledge. Aiming to inform the designers of such design tools we set out to characterize the design space of design cards in a two-pronged approach involving a) a systematic literature survey on the use of design cards and b) card sorting interviews, which were carried out in order to characterize the first impressions of design cards from design students, for different formal qualities and content of design cards. Our results point towards a need to develop more abstract and evocative presentations, that are visually attractive while supporting a flexible application of cards. Future research could explore whether such preferences are consistent with how card sets are used during design processes in practice.