ACI

While ACI researchers aspire to design animal-centred technology, they must operate within socio-economic systems that are not necessarily animal-centred. This creates a tension between researchers’ endeavour to address the immediate needs of animals in ...

Despite a massive acceptance of ‘animal-centered design’ being at the very heart of Animal-Computer Interaction, exactly what it means to be animal-centered often remains vague. In this position paper, I question and critique what animal-centered ...

Interacting with animals in a safari park is an important opportunity to think about animals, and plays a role beyond providing a healing effect through animals. However, safari park online tours do not allow users to experience touching animals, and ...

Recent technological advances have made touchscreen devices more widely available for animal-computer interaction, but there is little consensus about methods for discrimination task training frameworks. Here we discuss the potential enrichment and ...

Emotions play a transcendental role in the behavior of dogs. Their emotional response to certain stimuli and situations can be decisive in their actions. Automatic recognition of dog emotions gives ethologists and trainers the ability to monitor dog ...

Mastication is considered a coping mechanism in dogs, therefore, providing chew toys as an enrichment technique may be particularly important in stressful environments, such as the kennel. However, the relationship between chewing and welfare in kennel-...

Large-scale, pretrained vision-language models such as OpenAI’s CLIP are a game changer in Computer Vision due to their unprecedented ‘zero-shot’ image classification capabilities. As they are pretrained on huge amounts of unsupervised web-scraped data,...

Animal shelters deal with many challenges: they are understaffed, overcrowded, run on limited budgets and have very limited resources. An important issue in this context is behavioral assessment and screening of behaviour, temperament and personality ...

Ain et al. [1] measured three African Grey (Psittacus Erithacus) parrots’ discrimination abilities between discrete and continuous quantities. Some features of their experimental protocol make it difficult to apply to other subjects and/or species ...

While the advance of technology in our homes makes human lives easier, it also presents an ever growing source of sounds that may be confusing for the dogs that share our homes with us. To understand to what extent this may be a challenge, we present ...

When comparing two sets of objects, one can compare their cardinalities, or map one set to the other. Which of the two comparison methods an individual (human or not) is using depends of the cardinalities compared and of whether the representation is ...

Some video games were developed to entertain non human animals while measuring their abilities, logged in a file which can be analyzed later. Using such games to measure the limits of such abilities is problematic, as it requires the subjects to be ...

Validating that non human animals can communicate with humans using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) requires extensive logging, and traditional techniques are costly in resources and time. We propose to implement 1) a configurable “...

Wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors can detect dogs’ heartbeat signals and have proven useful in monitoring dogs’ welfare and predicting temperament scores in structured evaluations of potential guide dog puppies. Despite advances in the ...

For some precocial bird species, vocal interactions occur pre-hatching between parent and embryo within the egg. Such prenatal sensory experiences may affect development and have long-term consequences on postnatal behavior. Although artificial ...

Animal Assisted Interventions (AAIs) involve pleasant interactions between humans and animals and can potentially benefit both types of participants. Research in this field may help to uncover universal insights about cross-species bonding, dynamic ...

The quality of life of people who are susceptible to presenting a sudden medical emergency is reduced by constantly suffering from a mental state of insecurity and concern, both on the part of patients and their caregivers. This is the case for older ...

Sled dogs have performed vital services to mankind throughout history, transporting people, goods, mail, food, and medicines. Today, sled dog teams still provide transportation as well as sport, such as the famous Iditarod race. Studies show that of ...

Training guide dogs for visually-impaired people is a resource-consuming task for guide dog schools. This task is further complicated by a dearth of capabilities to objectively measure and analyze candidate guide dogs’ temperaments as they are placed ...

This paper presents a preliminary effort to evaluate alternative sensing modalities for automated, high-resolution tracking of dog tail position and movement as a behavioral communication tool. We compare two different methods: (1) inertial measurement ...

Watching animals use digital technology is known to affect our attitudes towards them, but there has been little empirical study of this topic. There is a need for greater understanding of how technology can shape people's perceptions of other species, ...

Blind or visually impaired pet dogs have additional challenges to overcome in their daily life in environments typically built for sighted humans, as do their caregivers in supporting them. From simple activities like finding their food in a hopefully ...

Face recognition, in the sense of identifying people, is controversial from a legal, social, and ethical perspective. In particular, opposition has been expressed to its use in public spaces for mass surveillance purposes. Face recognition in animals, ...

This workshop aims to explore the applicability of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) research ethics beyond the field's remit, to develop an animal-centered approach to the use of animals in research more broadly. The event is part of a longer-term ...

This workshop aims to facilitate human participants to become more aware of other animals’ sensory and aesthetic sensibilities, raising points for discussion and future research within ACI. For all animals, being able to make sense of the environment is ...

From cat feeders and cat flaps to robot toys, humans are deploying increasingly autonomous systems to look after their pets. In parallel, industry is developing the next generation of autonomous systems to look after humans in the home – most notably ...