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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to…
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems…
Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system formed by agents and their environment through active perception, embodied cognition, and action interaction. Existing embodied AI remains confined to human-crafted setting, in…
Digital tools have long been used for supporting children's creativity. Digital games that allow children to create artifacts and express themselves in a playful environment serve as efficient Creativity Support Tools (or CSTs). Creativity…
This study evaluates the integration of AI-powered robots in early childhood education, focusing on their impact on emotional self-regulation, engagement, and collaborative skills. A ten-week experimental design involving two groups of…
As robots increasingly coexist with humans, they must navigate complex, dynamic environments rich in visual information and implicit social dynamics, like when to yield or move through crowds. Addressing these challenges requires…
In order for robots and other artificial agents to efficiently learn to perform useful tasks defined by an end user, they must understand not only the goals of those tasks, but also the structure and dynamics of that user's environment.…
As collaborative robots enter industrial shop floors, logistics, and manufacturing, rapid and flexible evaluation of human-machine interaction has become more important. The availability of consumer headsets for virtual and augmented…
We are interested in the problem of multiagent systems development for risk detecting and emergency response in an uncertain and partially perceived environment. The evaluation of the current situation passes by three stages inside the…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
Building embodied AI systems that can follow arbitrary language instructions in any 3D environment is a key challenge for creating general AI. Accomplishing this goal requires learning to ground language in perception and embodied actions,…
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly involve continual learning to enable flexibility in general situations that are not encountered during system training. Human interaction with autonomous systems is broadly studied, but research…
Early language development shapes children's later literacy and learning, yet many families have limited access to scalable, high-quality support at home. Recent advances in generative AI make it possible for social robots to move beyond…
Brain-body co-evolution enables animals to develop complex behaviors in their environments. Inspired by this biological synergy, embodied co-design (ECD) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for creating intelligent agents-from virtual…
Today's AI models learn primarily through mimicry and refining, so it is not surprising that they struggle to solve problems beyond the limits set by existing data. To solve novel problems, agents should acquire skills for exploring and…
Critical periods are phases during which a toddler's brain develops in spurts. To promote children's cognitive development, proper guidance is critical in this stage. However, it is not clear whether such a critical period also exists for…
This paper discusses a 5-year PhD project, focused upon the implementation of social robots for general child and family care settings in the Netherlands. The project is a collaboration with general Dutch family care organisations as well…
Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-domain dialogues. However, current methods exhibit suboptimal performance in service dialogues, as they rely on noisy, low-quality human conversation data. This…
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder find robots easier to communicate with than humans. Thus, robots have been introduced in autism therapies. However, due to the environmental complexity, the used robots often have to be controlled…
Historically, researchers have focused on analyzing WEIRD, adult perspectives on technology. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for children and those from non-WEIRD countries. In this paper, we analyze children…