Micro-timing of backchannels in human-robot interaction

Inden B, Malisz Z, Wagner P, Wachsmuth I. Micro-timing of backchannels in human-robot interaction. Presented at the Timing in Human-Robot Interaction: Workshop in Conjunction with the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2014), Bielefeld, Germany

Visual Attention and Eye Gaze During Multiparty Conversations with Distractions

Our objective is to develop a computational model to predict visual attention behavior for an embodied conversational agent. During interpersonal interaction, gaze provides signal feedback and directs conversation flow. Simultaneously, in a dynamic environment, gaze also directs attention to peripheral movements. An embodied conversational agent should therefore employ social gaze not only for interpersonal interaction but also to possess human attention attributes so that its eyes and facial expression portray and convey appropriate distraction and engagement behaviors

Interactive narration with a child: impact of prosody and facial expressions

International audienceIntelligent Virtual Agents are suitable means for interactive sto-rytelling for children. The engagement level of child interaction with virtual agents is a challenging issue in this area. However, the characteristics of child-agent interaction received moderate to little attention in scientific studies whereas such knowledge may be crucial to design specific applications. This article proposes a Wizard of Oz platform for interactive narration. An experimental study in the context of interactive story-telling exploiting this platform is presented to evaluate the impact of agent prosody and facial expressions on child participation during storytelling. The results show that the use of the virtual agent with prosody and facial expression modalities improves the engagement of children in interaction during the narrative sessions

Automatic Context-Driven Inference of Engagement in HMI: A Survey

An integral part of seamless human-human communication is engagement, the process by which two or more participants establish, maintain, and end their perceived connection. Therefore, to develop successful human-centered human-machine interaction applications, automatic engagement inference is one of the tasks required to achieve engaging interactions between humans and machines, and to make machines attuned to their users, hence enhancing user satisfaction and technology acceptance. Several factors contribute to engagement state inference, which include the interaction context and interactants' behaviours and identity. Indeed, engagement is a multi-faceted and multi-modal construct that requires high accuracy in the analysis and interpretation of contextual, verbal and non-verbal cues. Thus, the development of an automated and intelligent system that accomplishes this task has been proven to be challenging so far. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on previous work in engagement inference for human-machine interaction, entailing interdisciplinary definition, engagement components and factors, publicly available datasets, ground truth assessment, and most commonly used features and methods, serving as a guide for the development of future human-machine interaction interfaces with reliable context-aware engagement inference capability. An in-depth review across embodied and disembodied interaction modes, and an emphasis on the interaction context of which engagement perception modules are integrated sets apart the presented survey from existing surveys

ENGAGE-DEM: a model of engagement of people with dementia

One of the most effective ways to improve quality of life in dementia is by exposing people to meaningful activities. The study of engagement is crucial to identify which activities are significant for persons with dementia and customize them. Previous work has mainly focused on developing assessment tools and the only available model of engagement for people with dementia focused on factors influencing engagement or influenced by engagement. This paper focuses on the internal functioning of engagement and presents the development and testing of a model specifying the components of engagement, their measures, and the relationships they entertain. We collected behavioral and physiological data while participants with dementia (N=14) were involved in six sessions of play, three of game-based cognitive stimulation and three of robot-based free play. We tested the concurrent validity of the measures employed to gauge engagement and ran factorial analysis and Structural Equation Modeling to determine whether the components of engagement and their relationships were those hypothesized. The model we constructed, which we call the ENGAGE-DEM, achieved excellent goodness of fit and can be considered a scaffold to the development of affective computing frameworks for measuring engagement online and offline, especially in HCI and HRI.Postprint (author's final draft

Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Abstract Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes-no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected languagespecific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers' ratings of these utterances as interrogatives

Simulating gaze attention behaviors for crowds

Crowd animation is a topic of high interest which offers many challenges. One of the most important is the trade-off between rich, realistic behaviors, and computational costs. To this end, much effort has been put into creating variety in character representation and animation. Nevertheless, one aspect still lacking realism in virtual crowd characters resides in their attention behaviors. In this paper, we propose a framework to add gaze attention behaviors to crowd animations. First, We automatically extract interest points from character or object trajectories in pre-existing animations. For a given character, We assign a set of elementary scores based on parameters such as distance or speed to all other characters or objects in the scene. We then combine these subscores in all overall scoring function. The scores obtained from this function form a set of gaze constraints that determine where and when each character should look. We finally enforce these constraints With all optimized dedicated gaze Inverse Kinematics (IK) solver. It first computes Me displacement maps for the constraints to be satisfied. It then smoothly propagates these displacements over all automatically defined number of frames. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method and our visually convincing results through various examples. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

The Turning, Stretching and Boxing Technique: a Direction Worth Looking Towards

3D avatar user interfaces (UI) are now used for many applications, a growing area for their use is serving location sensitive information to users as they need it while visiting or touring a building. Users communicate directly with an avatar rendered to a display in order to ask a question, get directions or partake in a guided tour and as a result of this kind of interaction with avatar UI, they have become a familiar part of modern human-computer interaction (HCI). However, if the viewer is not in the sweet spot (defined by Raskar et al. (1999) as a stationary viewing position at the optimal 90° angle to a 2D display) of the 2D display, the 3D illusion of the avatar deteriorates, which becomes evident as the user’s ability to interpret the avatar’s gaze direction towards points of interests (PoI) in the user’s real-world surroundings deteriorates also. This thesis combats the above problem by allowing the user to view the 3D avatar UI from outside the sweet spot, without any deterioration in the 3D illusion. The user does not lose their ability to interpret the avatar’s gaze direction and thus, the user experiences no loss in the perceived corporeal presence (Holz et al., 2011) for the avatar. This is facilitated by a three pronged graphical process called the Turning, Stretching and Boxing (TSB) technique, which maintains the avatar’s 3D illusion regardless of the user’s viewing angle and is achieved by using head-tracking data from the user captured by a Microsoft Kinect. The TSB technique is a contribution of this thesis because of how it is used with an avatar UI, where the user is free to move outside of the sweet spot without losing the 3D illusion of the rendered avatar. Then each consecutive empirical study evaluates the claims of the TSB Technique are also contributions of this thesis, those claims are as follows: (1) increase interpretability of the avatar’s gaze direction and (2) increase perception of corporeal presence for the avatar. The last of the empirical studies evaluates the use of 3D display technology in conjunction with the TSB technique. The results of Study 1 and Study 2 indicate that there is a significant increase in the participants’ abilities to interpret the avatar’s gaze direction when the TSB technique is switched on. The survey from Study 1 shows a significant increase in the perceived corporeal presence of the avatar when the TSB technique is switched on. The results from Study 3 indicate that there is no significant benefit for participants’ when interpreting the avatar’s gaze direction with 3D display technology turned on or off when the TSB technique is switched on