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Affect understanding capability is essential for social robots to autonomously interact with a group of users in an intuitive and reciprocal way. However, the challenge of multi-person affect understanding comes from not only the accurate…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots powered by a large language model (LLM) are entering young children's learning and play, yet little is known about how young children construe these agents or how such construals relate to engagement.…
This study evaluates the integration of AI-powered robots in early childhood education, focusing on their impact on emotional self-regulation, engagement, and collaborative skills. A ten-week experimental design involving two groups of…
AI companionship, where users develop emotional bonds with AI systems, has emerged as a significant pattern with positive but also concerning implications. We introduce Interactions and Machine Attachment Benchmark (INTIMA), a benchmark for…
General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance.…
In this paper we present an integrated robotic system capable of participating in and performing a wide range of educational and entertainment tasks, in collaboration with one or more children. The system, called ChildBot, features…
Recent studies have revealed that using social robots can accelerate the learning process of several skills in areas where autistic children typically show deficits. However, most early research studies conducted interactions via free play.…
AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to…
Understanding emotional responses in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during social interaction remains a critical challenge in both developmental psychology and human-robot interaction. This study presents a novel deep learning…
In this work we tackle the problem of child engagement estimation while children freely interact with a robot in their room. We propose a deep-based multi-view solution that takes advantage of recent developments in human pose detection. We…
AI companions are increasingly popular among teenagers, yet current platforms lack safeguards to address developmental risks and harmful normalization. Despite growing concerns, little is known about how parents and developmental psychology…
Parenting brings emotional and physical challenges, from balancing work, childcare, and finances to coping with exhaustion and limited personal time. Yet, one in three parents never seek support. AI systems potentially offer stigma-free,…
AI companion chatbots increasingly shape how people seek social and emotional connection, sometimes substituting for relationships with romantic partners, friends, teachers, or even therapists. When these systems adopt those metaphorical…
Parent-AI collaboration to support real-time conversations with children is challenging due to the sensitivity and open-ended nature of such interactions. Existing systems often simplify collaboration into static modes, providing limited…
Development in digital technologies has continuously reshaped how individuals seek and receive social and emotional support. While online platforms and communities have long served this need, the increased integration of general-purpose…
Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…
Social anxiety is a prevalent condition that affects interpersonal interactions and social functioning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and social robotics offer new opportunities to examine social anxiety in the human-robot…
Many children experience challenges in emotional regulation and social interaction, which can limit their participation in everyday activities and therapeutic programs. For socially assistive robots to be effective in this context, it is…
We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and socially…
The rapid advancement of AI companionship systems has positioned them as scalable interventions for addressing social isolation. Current design approaches emphasize maximizing user engagement and satisfaction, treating effective alignment…