Abstract
The concept of robots, or other autonomous constructions, can be found in many different cultures dating back to ancient times. A companion robot is defined as a device consisting of a physical robot component that connects to Cloud services to improve the ease and productivity of activities through networking, multi-media and sensory technologies. Many studies found out that anthropomorphic designs of what robots are, what they can do, and how they should be understood resulted in greater user engagement within the history of Western countries. Humanoid robots usually behave like natural social interaction partners for human users, with features such as speech, gestures, and eye-gaze, in referring to the personal data and social background of the users. Cultural differences may influence human-robot interaction with different social norms and cultural traits. This talk discusses some related works in companion robots and presents a research topic on an in-vehicle robot application from this socio-technical perspective.

Short Biography
Patrick C. K. Hung is a Professor and Director of International Programs at the Faculty of Business and Information Technology in Ontario Tech University, Canada. He is currently working with the College of Technological Innovation at Zayed University on several smart city and cybersecurity research projects in the United Arab Emirates. Patrick worked with Boeing Research and Technology at Seattle on aviation services-related research with two U.S. patents on mobile network dynamic workflow system. Before that, he was a Research Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia. He is a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing, and the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. He is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, as well as he is coordinating editor of the Information Systems Frontiers.?