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Recently, research in human-robot interaction began to consider a robot's influence at the group level. Despite the recent growth in research investigating the effects of robots within groups of people, our overall understanding of what…
This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning to…
Despite the growing interest for expressive speech synthesis, synthesis of nonverbal expressions is an under-explored area. In this paper we propose an audio laughter synthesis system based on a sequence-to-sequence TTS synthesis system. We…
Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots…
Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments…
Strategies are necessary to mitigate the impact of unexpected behavior in collaborative robotics, and research to develop solutions is lacking. Our aim here was to explore the benefits of an affective interaction, as opposed to a more…
Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it…
We found that children in elementary school often experience stress during task performance. Limited coping skills and lack of stress awareness restrict children's ability to manage their stress. Many designs and studies have proposed…
In recent years, a number of models that learn the relations between vision and language from large datasets have been released. These models perform a variety of tasks, such as answering questions about images, retrieving sentences that…
A key challenge in developing engaging social robots is creating convincing, autonomous and responsive agents, which users perceive, and treat, as social beings. As a part of the collaborative project: Expressive Agents for Symbiotic…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
Robots can learn from humans by asking questions. In these questions the robot demonstrates a few different behaviors and asks the human for their favorite. But how should robots choose which questions to ask? Today's robots optimize for…
Previous papers presented Witscript and Witscript 2, AI systems for improvising jokes in a conversation. Witscript generates jokes that rely on wordplay, whereas the jokes generated by Witscript 2 rely on common sense. This paper extends…
As robots become more integrated into society, detecting robot errors is essential for effective human-robot interaction (HRI). When a robot fails repeatedly, how can it know when to change its behavior? Humans naturally respond to robot…
Creativity in social robots requires further attention in the interdisciplinary field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This paper investigates the hypothesised connection between the perceived creative agency and the animacy of social…
Humanoid robots have apparently similar body structure like human beings. Due to their technical design, they are sharing the same workspace with humans. They are placed to clean things, to assist old age people, to entertain us and most…
As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through…
Social robots, owing to their embodied physical presence in human spaces and the ability to directly interact with the users and their environment, have a great potential to support children in various activities in education, healthcare…
Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate…
We present a system for generating and understanding of dynamic and static spatial relations in robotic interaction setups. Robots describe an environment of moving blocks using English phrases that include spatial relations such as…