Advancements in AI-driven multilingual comprehension for social robot interactions: An extensive review

In the digital era, human-robot interaction is rapidly expanding, emphasizing the need for social robots to fluently understand and communicate in multiple languages. It is not merely about decoding words but about establishing connections and building trust. However, many current social robots are limited to popular languages, serving in fields like language teaching, healthcare and companionship. This review examines the AI-driven language abilities in social robots, providing a detailed overview of their applications and the challenges faced, from nuanced linguistic understanding to data quality and cultural adaptability. Last, we discuss the future of integrating advanced language models in robots to move beyond basic interactions and towards deeper emotional connections. Through this endeavor, we hope to provide a beacon for researchers, steering them towards a path where linguistic adeptness in robots is seamlessly melded with their capacity for genuine emotional engagement

Emoji as a Proxy of Emotional Communication

Nowadays, emoji plays a fundamental role in human computer-mediated communications, allowing the latter to convey body language, objects, symbols, or ideas in text messages using Unicode standardized pictographs and logographs. Emoji allows people expressing more “authentically” emotions and their personalities, by increasing the semantic content of visual messages. The relationship between language, emoji, and emotions is now being studied by several disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML). Particularly, the last two are employed for the automatic detection of emotions and personality traits, building emoji sentiment lexicons, as well as for conveying artificial agents with the ability of expressing emotions through emoji. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of emoji and review the main challenges in using these as a proxy of language and emotions, the ML, and NLP techniques used for classification and detection of emotions using emoji, and presenting new trends for the exploitation of discovered emotional patterns for robotic emotional communication

The Hand and Cognition… and Intersubjectivity, Agency, Culture, and More. A review of The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental

A review of 'The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental', ed. Zdravko Radman

Environments of Intelligence

What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? These are questions that motivate "4E" theories of cognition (as being embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). In his take on that family of views, Hajo Greif first defends and refines a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character, which had been eclipsed by information-processing views of cognition. He continues with an inquiry into the cognitive bearing of some artefacts that are sometimes referred to as 'intelligent environments'. Without necessarily having much to do with Artificial Intelligence, such artefacts may ultimately modify our informational environments. With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of digital computers is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way we perceive, think and act. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY licenc

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR: THE EFFECTS OF RELATIONALISM ON THE SELECTION OF INFORMATION SOURCES

In a world where \u27Google\u27 is a verb, this research asks the question \u27what influences an individual\u27s decision to select one information source over another?\u27 Previous works have discussed relational versus nonrelational information sources (Rulke, Zaheer, & Anderson, 2000). Other research focuses on the information quality (O\u27Reilly, 1982), source accessibility (Culnan, 1984, 1985), or source richness (Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987; Daft & Macintosh, 1981) but all these prior works do not address the social aspects of information sources. This research defines and develops the construct of relationalism which is reflective of the social aspects of information sources. An important argument put forth in this work is that individuals will interact differently with a source based on its relationalism. Communication literature suggests that an individual will respond socially to another\u27s social invitation even if the \u27other\u27 is actually an inanimate object (Nass & Moon, 2000). For example, individuals responded to social cues given by a robot no differently than the same social cues from a three-year-old child. To investigate source selection this research uses two experiments and a survey. The experimental approach allows for a high level of control over the task design and other extraneous influences. The survey methodology utilizes knowledge workers in business organizations, and examines the profiles of sources used in a realistic work setting. While the experimental design improves the internal validity of the model, the survey approach allows for a superior assessment of the external validity. Such methodological triangulation provides for a robust testing of the model and greater confidence in its emerging prescriptions. The first experiment investigates the antecedents to relationalism. Objective design characteristics were found to be positively related to relationalism. Furthermore a socially oriented factor was also related to relationalism. The second experiment investigated the relationship between relationalism and source selection. This experiment also included task effects and controlled for personality variables. The relationship between relationalism and source selection depended on the nature of the task with more complex tasks indicating a stronger preference for higher relationalism sources. The findings from the survey of knowledge workers largely corroborated the findings from the experiments though some differences were seen. From the experimental and survey results implications for research and practice are developed. Further this research contributes to a deeper understanding of information source selection in a modern IT-enabled environment

Human-machine communication for educational systems design

This book contains the papers presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on the Basics of man-machine communication for the design of educational systems, held August 16-26, 1993, in Eindhoven, The Netherland