Adaptive Emotional Personality Model based on Fuzzy Logic Interpretation of Five Factor Theory

In recent years, emotional personality has found an important application in the field of human machine interaction. Interesting examples of this domain are computer games, interface agents, human-robot interaction, etc. However, few systems in this area include a model of personality, although it plays an important role in differentiating and determining the way they experience emotions and the way they behave. Personality simulation has always been a complex issue due to the complexity of the human personality itself, and the difficulty to model human psychology on electronic basis. Current efforts for emotion simulation are rather based on predefined set or inputs and its responses or on classical models which are simple approximate and have proven flaws. In this paper an emotional simulation system was presented. It utilizes the latest psychological theories to design a complex dynamic system that reacts to any environment, without being pre-programmed on sets of input. The design was relying on fuzzy logic to simulate human emotional reaction, thus increasing the accuracy by further emulating human brain and removing the pre-defined set of input and its matched output

Sympathy Begins with a Smile, Intelligence Begins with a Word: Use of Multimodal Features in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction

Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics. However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue, correlate with users' impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find that happiness in the user's recognised facial expression strongly correlates with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that facial expression, emotional features, and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning based adaptive human-robot dialogue systems.Comment: Robo-NLP workshop at ACL 2017. 9 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

Embodied Robot Models for Interdisciplinary Emotion Research

Due to their complex nature, emotions cannot be properly understood from the perspective of a single discipline. In this paper, I discuss how the use of robots as models is beneficial for interdisciplinary emotion research. Addressing this issue through the lens of my own research, I focus on a critical analysis of embodied robots models of different aspects of emotion, relate them to theories in psychology and neuroscience, and provide representative examples. I discuss concrete ways in which embodied robot models can be used to carry out interdisciplinary emotion research, assessing their contributions: as hypothetical models, and as operational models of specific emotional phenomena, of general emotion principles, and of specific emotion ``dimensions''. I conclude by discussing the advantages of using embodied robot models over other models.Peer reviewe

Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion