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Emotions are an integral part of being human, and experiencing a range of emotions is what makes life rich and vibrant. From basic emotions like anger, fear, happiness, and sadness to more complex ones like excitement and grief, emotions…

Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often experience communication challenges, primarily due to executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation, even after years of social integration. While existing interventions…

Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a…

Metaphors play a critical role in shaping user experiences with Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), yet existing designs often rely on static, human-centric metaphors that fail to adapt to diverse contexts and user needs. This paper introduces…

Affective interaction is not merely about recognizing emotions; it is an embodied, situated process shaped by context and co-created through interaction. In affective computing, the role of haptic feedback within dynamic emotional exchanges…

Fueled by recent advances of self-supervised models, pre-trained speech representations proved effective for the downstream speech emotion recognition (SER) task. Most prior works mainly focus on exploiting pre-trained representations and…

In this position paper, we aim to spark more discussions surrounding the use of empathy as the intended outcome of many studies on immersive virtual reality experiences. As a construct, empathy has many significant flaws that may lead to…

Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples' autonomy. In this…

Detecting miscommunication in human-robot interaction is a critical function for maintaining user engagement and trust. While humans effortlessly detect communication errors in conversations through both verbal and non-verbal cues, robots…

Modeling empathy is a complex endeavor that is rooted in interpersonal and experiential dimensions of human interaction, and remains an open problem within AI. Existing empathy datasets fall short in capturing the richness of empathy…

We study the problem of cross-lingual voice conversion in non-parallel speech corpora and one-shot learning setting. Most prior work require either parallel speech corpora or enough amount of training data from a target speaker. However, we…

Large-scale end-to-end models such as Whisper have shown strong performance on diverse speech tasks, but their internal behavior on pathological speech remains poorly understood. Understanding how dysarthric speech is represented across…

Effective collaboration between embodied agents requires more than acting in a shared environment; it demands communication grounded in each agent's evolving understanding of the world. When agents can only partially observe their…

Because the performance of speech separation is excellent for speech in which two speakers completely overlap, research attention has been shifted to dealing with more realistic scenarios. However, domain mismatch between training/test…

Large language models (LLMs) represent words through contextual word embeddings encoding different language properties like semantics and syntax. Understanding these properties is crucial, especially for researchers investigating language…

In VR interactions with embodied conversational agents, users' emotional intent is often conveyed more by how something is said than by what is said. However, most VR agent pipelines rely on speech-to-text processing, discarding prosodic…

The main approach to evaluating communication is by assessing how well it facilitates coordination. If two or more individuals can coordinate through communication, it is generally assumed that they understand one another. We investigate…

Any new medium, once it emerges, is used for more than the transmission of overt content alone. The information it carries typically operates on two levels: one is the content directly presented, while the other is the subtext beneath…

As parallel training data is scarce for one-shot voice conversion (VC) tasks, waveform reconstruction is typically performed by various VC systems. A typical one-shot VC system comprises a content encoder and a speaker encoder. However, two…

Knowing who is in one's vicinity is key to managing privacy in everyday environments, but is challenging for people with visual impairments. Wearable cameras and other sensors may be able to detect such information, but how should this…