78 research outputs found
Multimodal Dialogue Management for Multiparty Interaction with Infants
We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty
agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help
infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and
socially contingent conversations during an early-life critical period for
language development (ages 6 to 12 months) as initiated by an artificial agent.
As a first step, we focus on creating and maintaining agent-infant engagement
that elicits appropriate and socially contingent responses from the baby. Our
system includes two agents, a physical robot and an animated virtual human. The
system's multimodal perception includes an eye-tracker (measures attention) and
a thermal infrared imaging camera (measures patterns of emotional arousal). A
dialogue policy is presented that selects individual actions and planned
multiparty sequences based on perceptual inputs about the baby's internal
changing states of emotional engagement. The present version of the system was
evaluated in interaction with 8 babies. All babies demonstrated spontaneous and
sustained engagement with the agents for several minutes, with patterns of
conversationally relevant and socially contingent behaviors. We further
performed a detailed case-study analysis with annotation of all agent and baby
behaviors. Results show that the baby's behaviors were generally relevant to
agent conversations and contained direct evidence for socially contingent
responses by the baby to specific linguistic samples produced by the avatar.
This work demonstrates the potential for language learning from agents in very
young babies and has especially broad implications regarding the use of
artificial agents with babies who have minimal language exposure in early life
Towards the Use of Dialog Systems to Facilitate Inclusive Education
Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility
of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime, and almost instantaneously. However,
accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to
facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the
accessibility of computers and new mobile devices, favoring a more natural communication between
the student and the developed educative systems. This chapter describes innovative uses of multimodal
dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating
inclusive applications and learning activities
Hacia una educación inclusiva y personalizada mediante el uso de los sistemas de diálogo multimodal
Los continuos avances en el desarrollo de tecnologías de la información han dado lugar actualmente a la posibilidad de acceder a los contenidos educativos desde cualquier lugar, en cualquier momento y de forma casi instantánea. Sin embargo, la accesibilidad no es siempre considerada como criterio principal en el diseño de aplicaciones educativas, especialmente para facilitar su utilización por parte de personas con discapacidad. Diferentes tecnologías han surgido recientemente para fomentar la accesibilidad a las nuevas tecnologías y dispositivos móviles, favoreciendo una comunicación más natural con los sistemas educativos. En este artículo se describe el uso innovador de los sistemas de diálogo multimodales en el campo de la educación, con un especial énfasis en la descripción de las ventajas que ofrecen para la creación de aplicaciones educativas inclusivas y adaptadas a la evolución de los estudiantes.Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime and almost instantaneously. However, accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the accessibility of computers and new mobile devices favouring a more natural communication between the student and the developed educative systems. This paper describes innovative uses of multimodal dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating inclusive applications and adapted to the students specific evolution.Trabajo parcialmente financiado por los proyectos MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485) y TRA2010-20225-C03-01.Publicad
Reinforcement Learning Approaches in Social Robotics
This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics.
Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an
agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an
optimal behavior. Since interaction is a key component in both reinforcement
learning and social robotics, it can be a well-suited approach for real-world
interactions with physically embodied social robots. The scope of the paper is
focused particularly on studies that include social physical robots and
real-world human-robot interactions with users. We present a thorough analysis
of reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. In addition to a
survey, we categorize existent reinforcement learning approaches based on the
used method and the design of the reward mechanisms. Moreover, since
communication capability is a prominent feature of social robots, we discuss
and group the papers based on the communication medium used for reward
formulation. Considering the importance of designing the reward function, we
also provide a categorization of the papers based on the nature of the reward.
This categorization includes three major themes: interactive reinforcement
learning, intrinsically motivated methods, and task performance-driven methods.
The benefits and challenges of reinforcement learning in social robotics,
evaluation methods of the papers regarding whether or not they use subjective
and algorithmic measures, a discussion in the view of real-world reinforcement
learning challenges and proposed solutions, the points that remain to be
explored, including the approaches that have thus far received less attention
is also given in the paper. Thus, this paper aims to become a starting point
for researchers interested in using and applying reinforcement learning methods
in this particular research field
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