Would Abused Children Open Up to a Robot?

Guest: Cindy Bethel, Professor of Computer Science, Mississippi State University, Director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems Lab One of a police investigator's trickiest jobs can be interviewing a child who has been abused or witnessed a violent crime. The investigator must stay neutral, but police are just as human as the rest of us, and children, for their part, sometimes want to tell adults what they want to hear. Robots, on the other hand, don’t find neutrality difficult at all. But there are some pitfalls to using them in this kind of interview.