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The growing presence of service robots in human-centric environments, such as warehouses, demands seamless and intuitive human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a collaborative shelf-picking framework that combines multimodal…
Conversational Assistants (CA) are increasingly supporting human workers in knowledge management. Traditionally, CAs respond in specific ways to predefined user intents and conversation patterns. However, this rigidness does not handle the…
In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances…
When generating insights from human groups, conversational deliberation is a key method for exploring issues, surfacing ideas, debating options, and converging on solutions. Unfortunately, real-time conversations are difficult to scale,…
Coimagination method is a novel approach to support interactive communication for activating three (3) cognitive functions: episodic memory, division of attention, and planning. These cognitive functions are known to decline at an early…
Understanding and characterizing how people interact in information-seeking conversations is crucial in developing conversational search systems. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset designed for this purpose and use it to analyze…
Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the…
Many AI systems focus solely on providing solutions or explaining outcomes. However, complex tasks like research and strategic thinking often benefit from a more comprehensive approach to augmenting the thinking process rather than…
Data analysis is challenging as analysts must navigate nuanced decisions that may yield divergent conclusions. AI assistants have the potential to support analysts in planning their analyses, enabling more robust decision making. Though…
Sketch and speech are intuitive interaction methods that convey complementary information and have been independently used for 3D model retrieval in virtual environments. While sketch has been shown to be an effective retrieval method, not…
Precisely understanding users' contextual search intent has been an important challenge for conversational search. As conversational search sessions are much more diverse and long-tailed, existing methods trained on limited data still show…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of human-robot collaboration, effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder efficiency.…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for learning from trial and error, but it often requires a large number of interactions to achieve good performance. In some domains, such as sparse-reward tasks, an oracle that can provide…
We have developed a conversational recommendation system designed to help users navigate through a set of limited options to find the best choice. Unlike many internet scale systems that use a singular set of search terms and return a…
Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking…
Despite the many implicit references to the social aspects of search within Information Seeking and Retrieval research, there has been relatively little work that has specifically investigated the additional requirements for collaborative…
Enterprise conversational AI systems are becoming increasingly popular to assist users in completing daily tasks such as those in marketing and customer management. However, new users often struggle to ask effective questions, especially in…
API search involves finding components in an API that are relevant to a programming task. For example, a programmer may need a function in a C library that opens a new network connection, then another function that sends data across that…
It is natural for humans to collaborate while dealing with complex problems. In this article I consider this process of collaboration in the context of information seeking. The study and discussion presented here are driven by two…
What happens when your walls begin to move? This paper explores the design of human-robot interaction for architectural-scale, shape-changing environments. We present findings from two studies: (1) a series of speculative design workshops…