Academic Consortium Publications for June 2023

Probably the first thing you thought when Deep Blue beat world chess champ Garry Kasparov in 1997 was that it was only a matter of time before robots were pulling shots of espresso at your local cafe. Fast forward 26 years. A study by Park et al. (2023) pitted human baristas against a coffee-making robot. One group of consumers was assigned to “the robot experience” which amounted to watching the robot prep coffee. Another group watched a human barista brew coffee in the robot way. Robot-brewed coffee had a more consistent chemometric profile. There were not differences in consumer acceptance, but there were differences in which emotions were elicited. Human-brewed coffee elicited relatively more loving, nostalgic, warm, good natured, calm, tame, good, and tender emotions, whereas robot-brewed coffee elicited relatively more adventurous, worried, interested, pleasant, active, and aggressive emotions. Based on before/after surveys, consumers who had the robot experience decreased their food technology neophobia. Perhaps a future study could investigate how consumers respond to human baristas who do the robot (dance) while brewing coffee. While that study is being done, grab a cup of joe and check out these publications from members of the Compusense Academic Consortium.