ENGAGEMENT RECOGNITION AND GENERATION
FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION
Charles Rich
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
This talk will discuss our recent results on a computational model of
engagement in human-robot interaction. Based on a study of human
behavior, we have formalized the timelines for four types of
"connection events:" directed gaze, mutual facial gaze, adjacency
pairs and backchannels. We have implemented Robot Operating System
(ROS) modules for automatically recognizing and generating these
connection events between a human and a humanoid robot. Furthermore,
the generation module implements policies for appropriately adding
gaze and pointing gestures to referring phrases, such as deictic and
anaphoric references. Finally, we have validated the effectiveness of
these modules with a controlled experiment.
Biographical Sketch:
Charles Rich is a Professor of Computer Science and a member of the
Interactive Media and Game Development and the Robotics Engineering
faculties at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was previously a
Distinguished Research Scientist and founding member of Mitsubishi
Electric Research Laboratories. Rich earned his Ph.D. at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was a founder and
director of the Programmer's Apprentice project. He is a Fellow and
past Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence, as well as having served as chair of the 1992
International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and
Reasoning, cochair of the 1998 AAAI Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, program cochair of the 2004 and general cochair of the
2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, and
program cochair of the 2011 International Conference on the
Foundations of Digital Games.
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ALWAYS-ON RELATIONAL AGENTS
FOR THE SOCIAL SUPPORT OF ISOLATED OLDER ADULTS
Candace L. Sidner
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
This talk will provide an overview of our ongoing NSF project to
develop and evaluate a virtual/robotic companion for isolated older
adults. Key scientific issues in the project include: embodiment of
the companion as a virtual agent versus robot, the interaction
paradigm, engagement, development of a long term relationship, and a
real-time architecture for managing behaviors at different time
scales. The system supports multiple activities, including discussing
the weather, playing cards, telling stories, exercise coaching and
video conferencing. This year, we will be running a field study in
which the system operates continuously for a month in the homes of
isolated older adults.
Biographical Sketch:
Candy Sidner is a Research Professor in Computer Science at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, with extensive experience in industrial labs.
She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence, and a senior member of the IEEE. She serves
on the editorial boards of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces,
and ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, and on the
scientific advisory board of the Intelligent User Interface
conference. She has also been an associate editor of the journal
Artificial Intelligence, a member of the scientific advisory boards
for SIGDIAL, HLT-NAACL, and the EU Cognitive Systems for Cognitive
Assistants (CoSy) project. She has served as general chair for
HLT-NAACL 2007, program cochair of Intelligent User Interfaces 2006,
SIGIAL 2004, chair of Intelligent User Interfaces in 2001, and
President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1989).
She received her Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.
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