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As different research works report and daily life experiences confirm, learning models can result in biased outcomes. The biased learned models usually replicate historical discrimination in society and typically negatively affect the less…

As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…

This paper presents Affecta-context, a general framework to facilitate behavior adaptation for social robots. The framework uses information about the physical context to guide its behaviors in human-robot interactions. It consists of two…

Humans with an average level of social cognition can infer the beliefs of others based solely on the nonverbal communication signals (e.g. gaze, gesture, pose and contextual information) exhibited during social interactions. This social…

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…

Current robot platforms are being employed to collaborate with humans in a wide range of domestic and industrial tasks. These environments require autonomous systems that are able to classify and communicate anomalous situations such as…

While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of…

Humans and robots are increasingly working in personal and professional settings. In workplace settings, humans and robots may work together as colleagues, potentially leading to social expectations, or violation thereof. Extant research…

Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications…

For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…

To bring robots into human everyday life, their capacity for social interaction must increase. One way for robots to acquire social skills is by assigning them the concept of identity. This research focuses on the concept of…

There is growing interest in artificial intelligence to build socially intelligent robots. This requires machines to have the ability to "read" people's emotions, motivations, and other factors that affect behavior. Towards this goal, we…

When designing robots to assist in everyday human activities, it is crucial to enhance user requests with visual cues from their surroundings for improved intent understanding. This process is defined as a multimodal classification task.…

As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those…

Language-capable robots hold unique persuasive power over humans, and thus can help regulate people's behavior and preserve a better moral ecosystem, by rejecting unethical commands and calling out norm violations. However, miscalibrated…

Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…

When teams of robots collaborate to complete a task, communication is often necessary. Like humans, robot teammates should implicitly communicate through their actions: but interpreting our partner's actions is typically difficult, since a…

Fast changing tasks in unpredictable, collaborative environments are typical for medium-small companies, where robotised applications are increasing. Thus, robot programs should be generated in short time with small effort, and the robot…

We propose leveraging prosocial observations to cultivate new social norms to encourage prosocial behaviors toward delivery robots. With an online experiment, we quantitatively assess updates in norm beliefs regarding human-robot prosocial…

Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…