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Generative AI creates new opportunities for programming education, but many existing systems remain overly directive, producing lengthy explanations and premature solutions that can overwhelm K-12 novices. In this paper, we present a…
Current pre-trained language models (PLM) are typically trained with static data, ignoring that in real-world scenarios, streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. This requires PLMs to integrate the information from all the…
When caregivers ask open--ended questions to motivate dialogue with children, it facilitates the child's reading comprehension skills.Although there is scope for use of technological tools, referred here as "intelligent tutoring systems",…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been applied in various domains, including early childhood education (ECE). Integration of AI educational technology is a recent significant trend in ECE. Currently, there are more and more…
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,…
A dialogue act (DA) represents the meaning of an utterance at the illocutionary force level (Austin 1962) such as a question, a request, and a greeting. Since DAs take charge of the most fundamental part of communication, we believe that…
The next step for intelligent dialog agents is to escape their role as silent bystanders and become proactive. Well-defined proactive behavior may improve human-machine cooperation, as the agent takes a more active role during interaction…
YOLO is a social robot designed and developed to stimulate creativity in children through storytelling activities. Children use it as a character in their stories. This article details the artificial intelligence software developed for…
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…
This study examines whether engagement with social robots translates into improved human-directed social abilities in autistic children. We conducted an 8-week home-based randomized controlled trial with 40 children aged 5--9 using a…
This paper describes a case study and the insights gained from prototyping an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) for English vocabulary building for Spanish-speaking preschool children. After an initial exploration to evaluate the feasibility…
The heterogeneity between high-level vision-language understanding and low-level action control remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. Although recent methods have advanced task-specific action alignment, they often…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently been leveraged to generate robotic actions, forming Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, directly adapting a pretrained VLM for robotic control remains challenging, particularly when…
Social robots and interactive computer applications have the potential to foster early language development in young children by acting as peer learning companions. However, studies have found that children only trust robots which behave in…
The market for domestic robots made to perform household chores is growing as these robots relieve people of everyday responsibilities. Domestic robots are generally welcomed for their role in easing human labor, in contrast to industrial…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Integrating robotics into everyday scenarios like tutoring or physical training requires robots capable of adaptive, socially engaging, and goal-oriented interactions. While Large Language Models show promise in human-like communication,…
We have developed an AI-powered socio-technical system for making online learning in higher education more accessible, affordable and achievable. In particular, we have developed four novel and intertwined AI technologies: (1) VERA, a…
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…
Explanations constitute an important aspect of successful human robot interactions and can enhance robot understanding. To improve the understanding of the robot, we have developed four levels of explanation (LOE) based on two questions:…