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Public perceptions of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) are important in the acceptance, uptake, government regulation and research funding of this technology. Recent research has shown that the public's understanding of RAI can be…
As chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, we often wonder what users perceive as natural and socially accepted manners of interacting with them. Some researchers maintain that humans should avoid engaging in emotional conversations…
Integrating social robots in our group-based society, beyond the technical challenges, requires considering the social group dynamics. Following the results from preliminary exploratory studies on the influence of social robots on group…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to…
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…
The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and…
As robots are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios, a key question is how to best transfer knowledge learned in one environment to another, where shifting constraints and human preferences render adaptation challenging. A central…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
This paper presents a system for diversity-aware autonomous conversation leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The system adapts to diverse populations and individuals, considering factors like background,…
Chatbots are popular machine partners for task-oriented and social interactions. Human-human computer-mediated communication research has explored how people express their gender and sexuality in online social interactions, but little is…
The growing spread of robots for service and industrial purposes calls for versatile, intuitive and portable interaction approaches. In particular, in industrial environments, operators should be able to interact with robots in a fast,…
To design social robots to effectively promote health behavior change, it is essential to understand how people respond to various health communication strategies employed by these robots. This study examines the effectiveness of two types…
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…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information…
Social robots and conversational agents are being explored as supports for wellbeing, goal-setting, and everyday self-regulation. While prior work highlights their potential to motivate and guide users, much of the evidence relies on…
Understanding and respecting personal space preferences is essential for socially assistive robots designed for older adult users. This work introduces and evaluates a novel personalized context-aware method for modeling users' proxemics…
This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational…