Children-Robot Interaction: Eye Gaze Analysis of Children with Autism During Social Interactions

Background: Typical developing individuals utilize the direction of eye gaze and eye fixation/shifting as crucial elements to transmit socially relevant information (e.g. like, dislike) to others. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), deviant pattern of mutual eye gaze is a noticeable feature that may be one of the earliest (detectable) demonstrations of impaired social skills that would lead to other deficits in ASD Individuals (e.g. delaying development of social cognition and affective construal processes). This can significantly affect the quality of human’s social interactions. Recent studies reveal that children with ASD have superior engagement to the robot-based interaction, and it can effectively trigger positive behaviors (e.g. eye gaze attention). This suggests that interacting with robots may be a promising intervention approach for children with ASD. Objectives: The main objective of this multidisciplinary research is to utilize humanoid robot technology along with psychological and engineering sciences to better improve the social skills of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). The designed intervention protocol focuses on different skillsets, such as eye gaze attention, joint attention, facial expression recognition and imitation. The current study is designed to evaluate the eye gaze patterns of children with ASD during verbal communication with a humanoid robot. Methods: Participants in this study are 13 male children ages 7-17 (M=11 years) diagnosed with ASD. The study employs NAO, an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics to interact with ASD children in a series of conversations and interactive games across 3 sessions. During different game segments, NAO and children exchange stories and having conversation on different context. During every session of the game, four cameras which were installed in the video capturing room in addition to the NAO’s front-facing camera record the entire interaction. Videos were later score to analyze the gaze patterns of the children for two different context. Studying eye gaze fixation and eye gaze shifting while: 1) NAO is talking, 2) Kid is talking. Results: In order to analyze the eye gaze of participants, every frame of video was manually coded as Gaze Averted(‘0’) or Gaze At(‘1’) w.r.t NAO. To accurately analysis the gaze patterns of children during the conversation, the video segments of ‘NAO Talking’ and ‘Kid Talking’ have been selected. The averages of four measures were employed to report the static and dynamic properties of eye gaze patterns: 1) ‘NAO talking’: Gaze At NAO (GAN)= %55.3, Gaze Shifting (GS) =%3.4, GAN/GS = 34.10, Entropy GS: 0.20 2) ‘Kid talking’: GAN = %43.8, GS=%4.2, GAN/GS = 11.6, Entropy GS = 0.27 Conclusions: The results indicates that the children with ASD having more eye contact and less gaze shifting while NAO is talking (Higher GAN/GS and lower Entropy GS), however they prefer to shift their gaze more often and have less fixation on the robot as they are speaking. These results will serve as an important basis to significantly advance the emerging field of robot-assisted therapy for children with ASD

Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots

In order to provide personalized services and to develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec- ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user- aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robot’s system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets

Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

The acquisition of spanish perfective aspect : A study on children's production and comprehension

This paper presents the acquisition of Spanish perfective aspect in production and comprehension. It argues that, although young children use perfective aspect to talk about completed events, young children have difficulty in assessing perfective meaning from perfective morphology. This paper proposes that in the process of acquiring aspectual meaning, children use local strategies to decode aspectual meaning from form: when analyzing a completed situation, young children depend on certain learnability factors to correctly assess the entailment of completion of the perfective, namely, their ability to determine if the object of the event measures out the event as a whole or not, and their ability to read the agent’s intentions. When those factors are removed from the situation, young children had difficulty determining the entailment of completion of perfective aspect. This study also suggests that the manner in which aspectual information is conveyed in a language, may play a role on the readiness of the acquisition of the semantic morphology of the language (e.g., verb+object vs. verb+affixes). The results of this study indicate that successful performance on the semantics of Spanish perfective aspect develops around the age of 5-6

The ITALK project : A developmental robotics approach to the study of individual, social, and linguistic learning

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Frank Broz et al, “The ITALK Project: A Developmental Robotics Approach to the Study of Individual, Social, and Linguistic Learning”, Topics in Cognitive Science, Vol 6(3): 534-544, June 2014, which has been published in final form at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tops.12099 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving." Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots.Peer reviewe

Averting Robot Eyes

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms. We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology

A taxonomy of video lecture styles

Many educational organizations are employing instructional video in their pedagogy, but there is limited understanding of the possible presentation styles. In practice, the presentation style of video lectures ranges from a direct recording of classroom teaching with a stationary camera and screencasts with voice-over, up to highly elaborate video post-production. Previous work evaluated the effectiveness of several presentation styles, but there has not been any consistent taxonomy, which would have made comparisons and meta-analyses possible. In this article, we surveyed the research literature and we examined contemporary video-based courses, which have been produced by diverse educational organizations and teachers across various academic disciplines. We organized video lectures in two dimensions according to the level of human presence and according to the type of instructional media. In addition to organizing existing video lectures in a comprehensive way, the proposed taxonomy offers a design space that facilitates the choice of a suitable presentation style, as well as the preparation of new ones.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure