Related papers: Moderating Group Conversation Dynamics with Social…
In robot-assisted therapy for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the workload of therapists during a therapeutic session is increased if they have to control the robot manually. To allow therapists to focus on the interaction with…
This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the…
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…
When children are anxious or scared, it can be hard for them to stay still or follow instructions during medical procedures, making the process more challenging and affecting procedure results. This is particularly true for radiological…
Socialization is an essential development skill for preschool children. In collaboration with the LEGO Group, we developed Robert Robot, a simplified robot, which enables socialization between children and facilitates shared experiences…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
Social robots have emerged as valuable contributors to individuals' well-being coaching. Notably, their integration into long-term human coaching trials shows particular promise, emphasizing a complementary role alongside human coaches…
This study investigates whether the opinions of robotic agents can influence human decision-making when robots display value awareness (i.e., the capability of understanding human preferences and prioritizing them in decision-making). We…
Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) research is typically built around the premise that the robot serves to assist a human in achieving a human-led goal or shared task. However, there are many circumstances during HRI in which a robot may need…
Social robots are emerging as learning companions for children, and research shows that they facilitate the development of interest and learning even through brief interactions. However, little is known about how such technologies might…
We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of…
Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and…
This study explores how human perceptions of a non-anthropomorphic robotic manipulator are shaped by two key dimensions of behaviour: arousal, defined as the robot's movement energy and expressiveness, and attention, defined as the robot's…
Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…
Programming instructors often conduct collaborative learning activities, such as Peer Instruction (PI), to enhance student motivation, engagement, and learning gains. However, the impact of group discussion and formation mechanisms on…
In order to build dialogue systems to tackle the ambitious task of holding social conversations, we argue that we need a data driven approach that includes insight into human conversational chit chat, and which incorporates different…
Institutional and social barriers in higher education often prevent students with disabilities from effectively accessing support, including lengthy procedures, insufficient information, and high social-emotional demands. This study…
The rapid development of social robots has challenged robotics and cognitive sciences to understand humans' perception of the appearance of robots. In this study, robot-associated words spontaneously generated by humans were analyzed to…
People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain…
Voice-based discussion forums where users can record audio messages which are then published for other users to listen and comment, are often moderated to ensure that the published audios are of good quality, relevant, and adhere to…