Related papers: A Grounded Well-being Conversational Agent with Mu…
Agent-based modelling and simulation offers a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. In this paper we describe the development of an agent-based simulation model, designed to help to understand the relationship between…
This paper presents a study of the dynamic coupling between a user and a virtual character during body interaction. Coupling is directly linked with other dimensions, such as co-presence, engagement, and believability, and was measured in…
Chatbots are emerging as a promising platform for accessing and delivering healthcare services. The evidence is in the growing number of publicly available chatbots aiming at taking an active role in the provision of prevention, diagnosis,…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
Conversational AI agents are proliferating, embodying a range of devices such as smart speakers, smart displays, robots, cars, and more. We can envision a future where a personal conversational agent could migrate across different form…
We are increasingly surrounded by artificially intelligent technology that takes decisions and executes actions on our behalf. This creates a pressing need for general means to communicate with, instruct and guide artificial agents, with…
Effective communication in serious illness and palliative care is essential but often under-taught due to limited access to training resources like standardized patients. We present PAL (Palliative Assisted Learning-bot), a conversational…
The integration of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial settings raises concerns about worker well-being, particularly due to reduced social interactions. Avatars - designed to facilitate worker interactions and engagement - are…
Integrating multimodal foundation models has significantly enhanced autonomous agents' language comprehension, perception, and planning capabilities. However, while existing works adopt a \emph{task-centric} approach with minimal human…
Although engagement in self-directed wellness exercises typically declines over time, integrating social support such as coaching can sustain it. However, traditional forms of support are often inaccessible due to the high costs and complex…
In today's digital society, personalization has become a crucial aspect of software applications, significantly impacting user experience and engagement. A new wave of intelligent user interfaces, such as AI-based conversational agents, has…
Multi-agent systems - systems with multiple independent AI agents working together to achieve a common goal - are becoming increasingly prevalent in daily life. Drawing inspiration from the phenomenon of human group social influence, we…
The usage of virtual avatars in healthcare applications has become widely popular; however, certain critical aspects, such as social distancing and avatar size, remain insufficiently explored. This research investigates user experience and…
We present a system that enables real-time interaction between human users and agents trained to control fighter jets in simulated 3D air combat scenarios. The agents are trained in a dedicated environment using Multi-Agent Reinforcement…
We present a virtual reality (VR) environment featuring conversational avatars powered by a locally-deployed LLM, integrated with automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and lip-syncing. Through a pilot study, we explored…
This paper introduces Agentic-AI Healthcare, a privacy-aware, multilingual, and explainable research prototype developed as a single-investigator project. The system leverages the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) to orchestrate…
The integration of the physical capabilities of an industrial collaborative robot with a social virtual character may represent a viable solution to enhance the workers' perception of the system as an embodied social entity and increase…
In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the…
Conversational AI agents are commonly applied within single-user, turn-taking scenarios. The interaction mechanics of these scenarios are trivial: when the user enters a message, the AI agent produces a response. However, the interaction…
Healthcare professionals need effective ways to use, understand, and validate AI-driven clinical decision support systems. Existing systems face two key limitations: complex visualizations and a lack of grounding in scientific evidence. We…