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In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
The robotic intervention for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has generally used pre-defined scripts to deliver verbal content during one-to-one therapy sessions. This practice restricts the use of robots to limited,…
Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models rely on 2D inputs, lacking integration with the broader realm of the 3D physical world. Furthermore, they perform action prediction by learning a direct mapping from perception to action,…
Generative AI holds significant potential for ecological and environmental applications such as monitoring, data analysis, education, and policy support. However, its effectiveness is limited by the lack of a unified evaluation framework.…
Reduced social connectedness increasingly poses a threat to mental health, life expectancy, and general well-being. Generative AI (GAI) technologies, such as large language models (LLMs) and image generation tools, are increasingly…
Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) has shown promise in supporting emotion regulation for neurodivergent children. Recently, there has been increasing interest in leveraging advanced technologies to assist parents in co-regulating emotions…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general and well-known method that a robot can use to learn an optimal control policy to solve a particular task. We would like to build a versatile robot that can learn multiple tasks, but using RL for each…
With the recent development of natural language generation models - termed as large language models (LLMs) - a potential use case has opened up to improve the way that humans interact with robot assistants. These LLMs should be able to…
Who gets to decide how generative AI tools enter students' classrooms? We report on a five-week participatory design program in which three 11th-grade Latinx students and three high school teachers in California negotiated how generative AI…
Conversational agents have become an integral part of the general population for simple task enabling situations. However, these systems are yet to have any social impact on the diverse and minority population, for example, helping people…
From dating to job interviews, making new friends or simply chatting with the cashier at checkout, engaging in small talk is a vital, everyday social skill. For adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), small talk can be particularly…
We present a Research-through-Design case study of the design and development of an intimate-space tangible device perhaps best understood as a socially assistive robot, aimed at scaffolding children's efforts at emotional regulation. This…
Developmental psychologists have long-established the importance of socio-cognitive abilities in human intelligence. These abilities enable us to enter, participate and benefit from human culture. AI research on social interactive agents…
Autonomous reinforcement learning agents, like children, do not have access to predefined goals and reward functions. They must discover potential goals, learn their own reward functions and engage in their own learning trajectory.…
This paper explores educational interactions involving humans and artificial intelligences not as sequences of prompts and responses, but as a social process of conversation and exploration. In this conception, learners continually converse…
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces new considerations for English as a foreign language (EFL) writing pedagogy. This study explores how students talk to and through AI by prompt engineering and negotiating authorship,…
Children in a large number of international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US learn and speak more than one language. However, parents often struggle to acquaint their young children with their local language if the child…
Workplace learning is used to train employees systematically, e.g., via e-learning or in 1:1 training. However, this is often deemed ineffective and costly. Whereas pure e-learning lacks the possibility of conversational exercise and…
This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning to…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a special type of social robots that focus on providing support through…