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Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning have brought forth an impressive display of highly skilled artificial agents capable of complex intelligent behavior. In video games, these artificial agents are increasingly deployed as…
Emotion-aware customer service needs in-domain conversational data, rich annotations, and predictive capabilities, but existing resources for emotion recognition are often out-of-domain, narrowly labeled, and focused on post-hoc detection.…
This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and…
Often robots are seen as a means to an end to fulfill a logical objective task. Android robots, on the other hand, provide new possibilities to fulfill emotional tasks and could therefore be integrated into assistive scenarios. We explored…
By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman…
We present a series of two studies conducted to understand user's affective states during voice-based human-machine interactions. Emphasis is placed on the cases of communication errors or failures. In particular, we are interested in…
This paper describes a between-subjects Amazon Mechanical Turk study (n = 220) that investigated how a robot's affective narrative influences its ability to elicit empathy in human observers. We first conducted a pilot study to develop and…
As collaborative robots enter industrial shop floors, logistics, and manufacturing, rapid and flexible evaluation of human-machine interaction has become more important. The availability of consumer headsets for virtual and augmented…
Generative AI tools can provide people with the ability to create virtual environments and scenes with natural language prompts. Yet, how people will formulate such prompts is unclear -- particularly when they inhabit the environment that…
Recent progress in large language model (LLM) technology has significantly enhanced the interaction experience between humans and voice assistants (VAs). This project aims to explore a user's continuous interaction with LLM-based VA…
In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are…
Nonverbal behaviors, particularly gaze direction, play a crucial role in enhancing effective communication in social interactions. As social robots increasingly participate in these interactions, they must adapt their gaze based on human…
This paper targets the problem of speech act detection in conversations about bug repair. We conduct a "Wizard of Oz" experiment with 30 professional programmers, in which the programmers fix bugs for two hours, and use a simulated virtual…
As child-robot interactions become more and more common in daily life environment, it is important to examine how robot's errors influence children's behavior. We explored how a robot's unexpected behaviors affect child-robot interactions…
Achieving homophily, or association based on similarity, between a human user and a robot holds a promise of improved perception and task performance. However, no previous studies that address homophily via ethnic similarity with robots…
As anthropomorphic agents (AI and robots) are increasingly used in society, empathy and trust between people and agents are becoming increasingly important. A better understanding of agents by people will help to improve the problems caused…
Children and adults with cerebral palsy (CP) can have involuntary upper limb movements as a consequence of the symptoms that characterize their motor disability, leading to difficulties in communicating with caretakers and peers. We…
Wizard of Oz (WoZ) as a prototyping method has been used to simulate intelligent user interfaces, particularly for speech-based systems. However, as our societies' expectations on artificial intelligence (AI) grows, the question remains…
We build a virtual agent for learning language in a 2D maze-like world. The agent sees images of the surrounding environment, listens to a virtual teacher, and takes actions to receive rewards. It interactively learns the teacher's language…
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…