Neural Network Based Reinforcement Learning for Audio-Visual Gaze Control in Human-Robot Interaction

This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences, independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of socially acceptable gaze behavior.Comment: Paper submitted to Pattern Recognition Letter

Uso de la inteligencia artificial en la educación superior entre el 2018 y el 2023. Una revisión sistemática

El estudio: “Uso de la Inteligencia Artificial en la Educación Superior entre el 2018 - 2023. Una Revisión sistemática”, se propuso como objetivo determinar las características de la producción científica acerca del uso de la IA en la Educación Superior entre 2018 y 2023, para esto, se utilizó una metodología con un enfoque cualitativo y un diseño de investigación no experimental, basado en el cual se desarrolló una revisión sistemática con artículos de SciELO, Redalyc, EBSCO, ProQuest, Web of Science y Scopus. La muestra final estuvo conformada por 29 artículos. Los resultados del estudio permitieron establecer un panorama claro del nivel de investigación actual en el área, destacándose el hecho de que la IA ofrece claras ventajas para el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes universitarios a la par de que ofrece importantes desafíos desde el punto de vista moral y ético. En este sentido, el estudio, permite concluir que debe avanzarse en el desarrollo de estas tecnologías, sin dejar a un lado las consideraciones de tipo ético, de esta forma, su utilización permitirá el aprovechamiento de sus beneficios, dentro de un marco razonable de seguridad

Socially assistive robots : the specific case of the NAO

Numerous researches have studied the development of robotics, especially socially assistive robots (SAR), including the NAO robot. This small humanoid robot has a great potential in social assistance. The NAO robot’s features and capabilities, such as motricity, functionality, and affective capacities, have been studied in various contexts. The principal aim of this study is to gather every research that has been done using this robot to see how the NAO can be used and what could be its potential as a SAR. Articles using the NAO in any situation were found searching PSYCHINFO, Computer and Applied Sciences Complete and ACM Digital Library databases. The main inclusion criterion was that studies had to use the NAO robot. Studies comparing it with other robots or intervention programs were also included. Articles about technical improvements were excluded since they did not involve concrete utilisation of the NAO. Also, duplicates and articles with an important lack of information on sample were excluded. A total of 51 publications (1895 participants) were included in the review. Six categories were defined: social interactions, affectivity, intervention, assisted teaching, mild cognitive impairment/dementia, and autism/intellectual disability. A great majority of the findings are positive concerning the NAO robot. Its multimodality makes it a SAR with potential