Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 6

his is the complete volume of HMC Volume 6

Emotional body language synthesis for humanoid robots

Some of the chapters of this thesis are based on research published by the author. Chapter 4 is based on Marmpena M., Lim, A., and Dahl, T. S. (2018). How does the robot feel? Perception of valence and arousal in emotional body language. Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, 9(1), 168-182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2018-0012. Chapter 6 is based on Marmpena M., Lim, A., Dahl, T. S., and Hemion, N. (2019). Generating robotic emotional body language with Variational Autoencoders. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), pages 545–551. DOI:10.1109/ACII.2019.8925459. Chapter 7 extends Marmpena M., Garcia, F., and Lim, A. (2020). Generating robotic emotional body language of targeted valence and arousal with Conditional Variational Autoencoders. In Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI ’20, page 357–359. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378360. The designed or generated robotic emotional body language expressions data presented in this thesis are publicly available: https://github.com/minamar/rebl-pepper-dataIn the next decade, societies will witness a rise in service robots deployed in social environments, such as schools, homes, or shops, where they will operate as assistants, public relation agents, or companions. People are expected to willingly engage and collaborate with these robots to accomplish positive outcomes. To facilitate collaboration, robots need to comply with the behavioural and social norms used by humans in their daily interactions. One such behavioural norm is the expression of emotion through body language. Previous work on emotional body language synthesis for humanoid robots has been mainly focused on hand-coded design methods, often employing features extracted from human body language. However, the hand-coded design is cumbersome and results in a limited number of expressions with low variability. This limitation can be at the expense of user engagement since the robotic behaviours will appear repetitive and predictable, especially in long-term interaction. Furthermore, design approaches strictly based on human emotional body language might not transfer effectively on robots because of their simpler morphology. Finally, most previous work is using six or fewer basic emotion categories in the design and the evaluation phase of emotional expressions. This approach might result in lossy compression of the granularity in emotion expression. The current thesis presents a methodology for developing a complete framework of emotional body language generation for a humanoid robot, intending to address these three limitations. Our starting point is a small set of animations designed by professional animators with the robot morphology in mind. We conducted an initial user study to acquire reliable dimensional labels of valence and arousal for each animation. In the next step, we used the motion sequences from these animations to train a Variational Autoencoder, a deep learning model, to generate numerous new animations in an unsupervised setting. Finally, we extended the model to condition the generative process with valence and arousal attributes, and we conducted a user study to evaluate the interpretability of the animations in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The results indicate moderate to strong interpretability

Towards an Emotionally Intelligent Interaction Strategy for Multimodal Embodied Conversational Agents acting as Companions

Existing Human Computer Interaction (HCI) strategies are seriously limited by current technologies. These are neither sensitive nor accurate enough to respond to users’ emotional states, the fundamental basis for effective communication in real time. This offered the challenge of investigating factors that would impact on the designing of effective and more emotionally intelligent interaction strategies for Companions. These were applied to a conceptual tool, the Affective Channel (AC), to endow Companions with emotional capabilities. This was implemented in the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) platform to evaluate Companions in real time. The WoZ is an experimental setup where existing immature technologies and a human operator combine to simulate Companion interaction with end users. In these aspects of my work is my original contribution to the HCI knowledge base.Experiments, focus groups and face to face interviews were carried out to ascertain users’ perception and expectations of virtual agents. ‘Descriptors’ thus identified formed the bases for the designing of user friendly Companions. Verbal and facial expressions data and other affective elements of effective human-companion interactionwere collected for use in the AC and the WoZ as stated above.Companion evaluations yielded the subsidiary contribution that Companions are perceived as empathetic, useful and trustworthy entities. Further, that they arouse positive emotions in children and also that they promote their learning improvement.These findings were the result of two experiments, one within subjects and one between subjects, conducted with thirty grade four pupils in a rural school in the poor Oaxaca region of Mexico

Fictive interaction in blended networks in the daily show with Jon Stewart: conceptualizing politican humor discourse not only for entertaining purpouses

[ES] Esta tesis analiza el discurso de Jon Stewart, el anterior presentador del conocidísimo programa satírico de “soft news” estadounidense The Daily Show. Más concretamente, se analiza un fenómeno conceptual que el presentador utilizaba frecuentemente en sus monólogos, basado en el uso de un marco (“frame”) en el que se da la interacción directa cara a cara como patrón organizativo para estructurar la cognición, la interacción ficticia (“fictive interaction”) (Pascual 2002; 2006; 2008a; 2008b; 2014), no solo para informar a su audiencia pero también para criticar y presentar sus propios puntos de vista y opiniones. El objetivo principal fue analizar las redes de interacción ficticia creadas por Stewart, como estrategias retóricas de su discurso, que implicaban mantener conversaciones ficticias con personas “reales”, que no estaban presentes en el estudio y que en realidad no tomaban parte en cualquiera de estas interacciones, diseñadas tan solo para los espectadores. Aunque estos diálogos imaginarios se realicen en una estructura de interacción abierta, es decir, durante los monólogos del presentador, constituyen una comunicación tridireccional, conocida como triálogo ficticio (“fictive trialogue”) (Pascual 2002; 2008b; 2014). Los triálogos ficticios son estructuras conceptuales prototípicas de programas de televisión como The Daily Show, donde el presentador, Jon Stewart, que es el productor ficticio habla con un receptor ficticio para beneficio de los espectadores, los oyentes participativos (“bystanders”) ficticios que están escuchando las conversaciones irreales. Estas interacciones imposibles son producidas no solo para hacer reír el público, sino también con fines retóricos

Life beckoning. A thematic analysis of change in a deprived boy in long-term foster care, during intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy

This research is based on a single case study of psychoanalytic therapy with a young adolescent boy in care. It is part of a growing movement to identify research methods for exploring the place of unconscious expectations, emotion and affect, in relationships. It experiments with methods for testing out psychoanalytic theory and contributing findings to evidence, modify or expand theory in new directions. The patient Simon, had a history of deprivation and showed many features of ADHD and oppositional conduct disorder. The research locates him in a “family” of children who share histories of early traumas and serious behavioural difficulties. Therefore findings, while grounded in clinical material from a single case, and restricted in scope, are of relevance to work with a very needy and challenging population of children, who are often a major cause of concern to their carers, teachers, social workers and to mentalhealth professionals. The research examines clinical material through the framework of Bion’s theoretical claim that identifies thinking as at bottom an emotional process, and relates symbolic capacity to early emotional experiences of communication and containment. The framework was selected because of its relevance to the particular features of the patient, which emerged through the detailed study of session records. The analysis of patient therapist interaction follows Bion in looking at thinking and learning, side by side with the sort of internal objects active in the therapeutic relationship, and the emotions connected to them. Through a detailed focus on these aspects of clinical material, the author assesses some current ideas about what interferes with a deprived child’s capacity to think and learn from experience; and what are the factors in a therapeutic relationship that can help a child’s capacity in these areas to grow

A grounded theory study : of the role of interpersonal processes in community sexual offending group work programmes from a counselling psychology perspective

The effectiveness of Sexual Offending Treatment programmes has generally been measured through evaluating intervention content and reoffending rates. In response to the growing call to explore the role of therapeutic process in facilitating meaningful change on these programmes, this thesis considers how interpersonal dynamics may influence programme effectiveness from the perspective of the group member. This offers the opportunity to consider the impact of how we work, rather than what we do. The critical literature review uses a pluralistic framework to present relevant existing research and identify gaps in practice-based knowledge in the field of sexual offending intervention from a Counselling Psychology perspective. While the literature suggests interpersonal ingredients important to this process, it offers little information regarding where, when and how these qualities are effective. Furthermore, little is understood about the impact of relational dynamics between the facilitators and group members in creating a facilitative environment. This reveals broad gaps in research relating to a neglect of the client’s experience of these interactions and how they are conceptualised in their change process. This research therefore uses a social constructivist grounded theory method to generate data exploring these process issues. The results highlight the value of facilitators fostering a dynamic and balanced core interpersonal process that is sensitive to the unique context of these group interventions. This offers a foundation for group member engagement and effective group functioning relevant to subjective change. The implications for theory and practice are discussed, highlighting how a Counselling Psychology presence in this field has the potential to enhance practice. The study is concluded with reflections of the study’s limitations and areas in need of further research