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Enabling machines to respond appropriately to natural language commands could greatly expand the number of people to whom they could be of service. Recently, advances in neural network-trained word embeddings have empowered non-embodied…
As robotic systems become more and more capable of assisting humans in their everyday lives, we must consider the opportunities for these artificial agents to make their human collaborators feel unsafe or to treat them unfairly. Robots can…
During a conversation, individuals take turns speaking and engage in exchanges, which can occur smoothly or involve interruptions. Listeners have various ways of participating, such as displaying backchannels, signalling the aim to take a…
In the recent shift towards human-centric AI, the need for machines to accurately use natural language has become increasingly important. While a common approach to achieve this is to train large language models, this method presents a form…
Affective tactile interaction constitutes a fundamental component of human communication. In natural human-human encounters, touch is seldom experienced in isolation; rather, it is inherently multisensory. Individuals not only perceive the…
In multi-agent collaboration problems with communication, an agent's ability to encode their intention and interpret other agents' strategies is critical for planning their future actions. This paper introduces a novel algorithm called…
Communicating shapes our social word. For a robot to be considered social and being consequently integrated in our social environment it is fundamental to understand some of the dynamics that rule human-human communication. In this work, we…
Addressee Estimation is the ability to understand to whom a person is talking, a skill essential for social robots to interact smoothly with humans. In this sense, it is one of the problems that must be tackled to develop effective…
We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to equip neural robotic agents with human-like social and cognitive competencies, for the purpose of open-ended human-robot conversation and collaboration. We introduce a modular and…
Increasingly complex and autonomous robots are being deployed in real-world environments with far-reaching consequences. High-stakes scenarios, such as emergency response or offshore energy platform and nuclear inspections, require robot…
Implicit communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration (HRC), where contextual information, such as intentions, is conveyed as implicatures, forming a natural part of human interaction. However, enabling robots to appropriately use…
The increase in available computing power and the Deep Learning revolution have allowed the exploration of new topics and frontiers in Artificial Intelligence research. A new field called Embodied Artificial Intelligence, which places at…
Driven by ongoing improvements in machine learning, chatbots have increasingly grown from experimental interface prototypes to reliable and robust tools for process automation. Building on these advances, companies have identified various…
Cyber human interaction is a broad term encompassing the range of interactions that humans can have with technology. While human interaction with fixed and mobile computers is well understood, the world is on the cusp of ubiquitous and…
When humans work together to complete a joint task, each person builds an internal model of the situation and how it will evolve. Efficient collaboration is dependent on how these individual models overlap to form a shared mental model…
Communication between people is characterized by a broad range of nonverbal cues. Transferring these cues into the design of robots and other artificial agents that interact with people may foster more natural, inviting, and accessible…
This position paper reflects empirical data collected during my PhD from a large-scale within-subjects study (N = 90). The study compared a highly human-like, spoken embodied conversational agent (ECA) against a low human-like text base…
The role of robots is expanding from tool to collaborator. Socially assistive robots (SARs) are an example of collaborative robots that assist humans in the real world. As robots enter our social sphere, unforeseen risks occur during…
The rapid advancement of robotics, spanning expanded capabilities, more intuitive interaction, and more integration into real-world workflows, is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist. Beyond sharing physical space, this…
This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…