I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

Video prototyping of dog-inspired non-verbal affective communication for an appearance constrained robot

Original article can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org “This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This paper presents results from a video human-robot interaction (VHRI) study in which participants viewed a video in which an appearance-constrained Pioneer robot used dog-inspired affective cues to communicate affinity and relationship with its owner and a guest using proxemics, body movement and orientation and camera orientation. The findings suggest that even with the limited modalities for non-verbal expression offered by a Pioneer robot, which does not have a dog-like appearance, these cues were effective for non-verbal affective communication

Interact: A Mixed Reality Virtual Survivor for Holocaust Testimonies

In this paper we present Interact---a mixed reality virtual survivor for Holocaust education. It was created to preserve the powerful and engaging experience of listening to, and interacting with, Holocaust survivors, allowing future generations of audience access to their unique stories. Interact demonstrates how advanced filming techniques, 3D graphics and natural language processing can be integrated and applied to specially-recorded testimonies to enable users to ask questions and receive answers from that virtualised individuals. This provides a new and rich interactive narratives of remembrance to engage with primary testimony. We discuss the design and development of Interact, and argue that this new form of mixed reality is promising media to overcome the uncanny valley

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

Challenges in Collaborative HRI for Remote Robot Teams

Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency response, thus reducing the number of personnel placed in harm's way. As remote robots are generally trusted less than robots in close-proximity, we present a solution to instil trust in the operator through a `mediator robot' that can exhibit social skills, alongside sophisticated visualisation techniques. In this position paper, we present general challenges and then take a closer look at one challenge in particular, discussing an initial study, which investigates the relationship between the level of control the supervisor hands over to the mediator robot and how this affects their trust. We show that the supervisor is more likely to have higher trust overall if their initial experience involves handing over control of the emergency situation to the robotic assistant. We discuss this result, here, as well as other challenges and interaction techniques for human-robot collaboration.Comment: 9 pages. Peer reviewed position paper accepted in the CHI 2019 Workshop: The Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People (SIRCHI2019), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Glasgow, U