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It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most…
All robots create consequential sound -- sound produced as a result of the robot's mechanisms -- yet little work has explored how sound impacts human-robot interaction. Recent work shows that the sound of different robot mechanisms affects…
We present a new typology for classifying signals from robots when they communicate with humans. For inspiration, we use ethology, the study of animal behaviour and previous efforts from literature as guides in defining the typology. The…
Laughter is considered one of the most overt signals of joy. Laughter is well-recognized as a multimodal phenomenon but is most commonly detected by sensing the sound of laughter. It is unclear how perception and annotation of laughter…
Detection of engagement during a conversation is an important function of human-robot interaction. The level of user engagement can influence the dialogue strategy of the robot. Our motivation in this work is to detect several behaviors…
This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically…
This paper presents the results of a pilot study that introduces social robots into kindergarten and first-grade classroom tasks. This study aims to understand 1) how effective social robots are in administering educational activities and…
In this paper we address the problem of multi-cue affect recognition in challenging scenarios such as child-robot interaction. Towards this goal we propose a method for automatic recognition of affect that leverages body expressions…
Gender is a social framework through which people organize themselves-and non-human subjects, including robots. Research stretching back decades has found evidence that people tend to gender artificial agents unwittingly, even with the…
Human acceptance of social robots is greatly effected by empathy and perceived understanding. This necessitates accurate and flexible responses to various input data from the user. While systems such as this can become increasingly complex…
This paper presents a research platform that supports spoken dialogue interaction with multiple robots. The demonstration showcases our crafted MultiBot testing scenario in which users can verbally issue search, navigate, and follow…
As more and more social robots are being used for collaborative activities with humans, it is crucial to investigate mechanisms to facilitate trust in the human-robot interaction. One such mechanism is humour: it has been shown to increase…
Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better…
As robots are increasingly endowed with social and communicative capabilities, they will interact with humans in more settings, both collaborative and competitive. We explore human-robot relationships in the context of a competitive…
Small talk can foster rapport building in human-human teamwork; yet how non-anthropomorphic robots, such as collaborative manipulators commonly used in industry, may capitalize on these social communications remains unclear. This work…
In this work, we propose a gesture based language to allow humans to interact with robots using their body in a natural way. We have created a new gesture detection model using neural networks and a custom dataset of humans performing a set…
How do humans recognize and rectify social missteps? We achieve social competence by looking around at our peers, decoding subtle cues from bystanders - a raised eyebrow, a laugh - to evaluate the environment and our actions. Robots,…
The ability to modulate vocal sounds and generate speech is one of the features which set humans apart from other living beings. The human voice can be characterized by several attributes such as pitch, timbre, loudness, and vocal tone. It…
Watching TV not only provides news information but also gives an opportunity for different generations to communicate. With the proliferation of smartphones, PC, and the Internet, increase the opportunities for communication in front of the…
Communication in both human-human and human-robot interac-tion (HRI) contexts consists of verbal (speech-based) and non-verbal(facial expressions, eye gaze, gesture, body pose, etc.) components.The verbal component contains semantic and…