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

Becoming Human with Humanoid

Nowadays, our expectations of robots have been significantly increases. The robot, which was initially only doing simple jobs, is now expected to be smarter and more dynamic. People want a robot that resembles a human (humanoid) has and has emotional intelligence that can perform action-reaction interactions. This book consists of two sections. The first section focuses on emotional intelligence, while the second section discusses the control of robotics. The contents of the book reveal the outcomes of research conducted by scholars in robotics fields to accommodate needs of society and industry

Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)

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

Lovotics: Love + Robotics, Sentimental Robot With Affective Artificial Intelligence

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

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

Organizational identity design: A multimodal discourse analysis of Australian university homepages

This thesis studies web homepages to understand the complex social practice of organizational identity communication on a digital medium. It examines how designs of web homepages realize discourses of identity through the mobilization and orchestration of various semiotic resources into multimodal ensembles, addressing critical organizational visual identity elements (‘logo,’ ‘corporate name,’ ‘color,’ ‘typography,’ ‘graphic shapes,’ and ‘images’), communicative content of the page, and navigation structures. By examining these three ‘strata’ of organizational identity communication, it investigates how a homepage uses formal design elements and more abstract principles of composition, such as spatial positioning and content ordering, as resources for making meaning. The data consists of three complementary sets drawn from thirty-nine web homepages of Australian university websites in 2020. Data set #1 includes four homepages for an in-depth study of organizational identity designs; data set #2 consists of 400 images from the ‘above the fold’ web area as the most strategic space on four homepages between the years 2015 and 2021; data set #3 is comprised of eight historical versions of a selected web homepage between the years 2000 and 2021, with three most representative designs for an in-depth investigation. Grounded in the discourse-analytic approach informed by multimodal social semiotics, the thesis adopts a mixed-method approach to data analysis. It applies multimodal discourse analysis combining the Genre and Multimodality model (Bateman, 2008; Bateman et al., 2017) to document the structural design patterns and social semiotic (metafunctional) approach to address the meaning potentials of the identified patterns; (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021); content analysis (Bell, 2001; Rose, 2016) and visual social actor framework (van Leeuwen, 2008) to identify key representational tropes and visual personae. The study reveals the role of design as a mediating tool between the participants of discourse – the rhetor-institution/designer and envisaged audiences – and offers systematic insights into the uses of semiotic resources, both material (e.g., formal design elements and navigation structures) and nonmaterial (e.g., spatial considerations and content structuring), all contributing to the production of meanings and fostering identification with such meanings in the form of association with the university’s identity. Addressing the subtle differences and shifts in the form and function of key layout structures and strategies of viewer engagement, the study concludes that is plural – each university constantly revises semiotic choices and their multimodal composition to achieve specific rhetorical purposes. Together with several visual design choices, five identified strategies of viewer engagement – proximation, alignment, equalization, objectivation, and subjectivation – promote the university as a place of opportunity, achievement, sociality, and intellectual growth for a student as an individual and as a member of the community. The current research contributes to the emerging collaboration between multimodality, organization studies, and branding, recognizing the complexities and importance of multimodal communication in web-mediated texts amidst the critically increased roles of marketization and social presence in the current higher education landscape

Software curating : the politics of curating in/as (an) Open System(s)

The thesis examines how Information technologies have changed the practice of curating. It proposes an Interdisciplinary approach that directly links curating (often understood as an activity of artistic programming), computing (the activity of computer programming) and a relatively recent Interest In software art (in which programming Is understood as artistic practice). Although there Is much contemporary critical work and practice that Is described as art-oriented programming or software art, the thesis aims to explore a perceived gap In discussions around software curating. Curators working with online technologies are presented with the challenge of how to respond to new artistic forms that Involve programming: for Instance program-objects that display dynamic and transformative properties, and that are distributed over socio-technological networks. Although there are many examples of social platforms and highly relevant examples of online 'art platforms', these still largely operate In display mode replicating more conventional models of curating and the operations of art Institutions In general. The tendency Is for these curatorial online systems to concentrate on the display of executed code and pay less attention to source code. New sensibilities are required that simultaneously reflect the significance of source code as art, and software not as a production tool or a display platform but as cultural practice that Is analogous to curating. What Is distinctive about the thesis Is that It speculates on a curatorial model that emphasises the analogy to programming. Consequently, the thesis argues for online software systems that display properties of curating but reprocess established definitions by deliberately collapsing firm distinctions between the fields of programming, artistic practice and curatorial practice. To consider these Issues, the thesis brings together a number of Inter-related fields of critical Inquiry and situates curating In the context of theories of immateriality, a critical discourse around software art practice, and an understanding of open systems. The key Issue for the thesis becomes how power relations, control and agency are expressed In new curatorial forms that Involve programming and networks; In other words, the thesis Is concerned with the politics of curating In/as (an) open system(s). Indeed, curating Itself can be described In terms of open systems, Implying a state In which there Is continuous Interaction with the soclo-technological environment. The system Is opened up to communicative processes that Involve producers/users and to divergent exchanges that take place and that disrupt established social relations of production and distribution. Thus, and Importantly for an understanding of the power relations Involved, software opens up curating to dynamic possibilities and transformations beyond the usual Institutional model (analogous to the model of production associated with the industrial factory) Into the context of networks (and what Is referred to by the Autonomists as the 'social factory'). The suggestion Is that the curatorial process Is now closely Integrated with the dynamic soclo-technological networks and with software that Is not simply used to curate but demonstrates the activity of curatIng In Itself Consequently, the thesis offers an expanded description of curating with respect to software In which agency Is reconstituted to Include alternative dynamics of networks. The curatorial model Is not only theorlsed but also deployed In the production of experimental software for curating source code (kurator) that forms the practical part of the doctoral research. in addition to a written thesis and software, two further projects produced during the registration period 2002-2008 are Included in support of the overall thesis: a conference CuratIng, Immaterlafity, Systems (CIS) (Tate Modern, London 2005) and an edited book Curating immateriality: The Work of The Curator In the Age of Network Systems (CI) (Autonomedia, New York 2006). The kurator software Is a further development of the conference and subsequent book, and offers an online, user-moderated curatorial system for further public modification. In so doing, the argument Is that the curatorial process Is demonstrably a collective and distributed executable that displays machinic agency. This Is what Is referred to in the thesis as software curating.Faculty of Technology and Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth