A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos

An emotional interface for a music gathering application

Listening to music while travelling is a pleasant activity. The latest MP3 players demonstrate that storage and management of music will not be a problem in the near future. Besides listening to music the user might also want to gather new music from the Internet. We propose a music gathering application that helps the user to collect music and that is able to proactively search and download music based on the users music preferences. Furthermore, we developed an emotional interface character that provides instant and natural feedback on the status of the applicatio

Lino, the user-interface robot

This paper reports on the development of a domestic user-interface robot that is able to have a natural human interaction by speech and emotional feedback and is able to navigate in a home environment. The natural interaction with the user is achieved by means of a mechanical head able to express emotions. The robot is aware of the position and identities of the users, both from visual and auditory information. The robot estimates its location in the environment with an appearance-based localization method using a stereo camera system. The navigation to the goal is achieved with a hybrid method, combining planning with reactive control. The robot is designed to operate in an intelligent environment, such that external information can be used to localize users and their intentions (context awareness), and that additional information can be retrieved from various databases in the environment. The result is a service robot that can have a simple dialogue with the user, provide information in a natural way (speech and expressions) and can be instructed to navigate to any specific goal in the environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.status: publishe

A user-interface robot for ambient intelligent environments

status: publishe

Study of the morphology of organic ferroelectric diodes with combined scanning force and scanning transmission X-ray microscopy

\u3cp\u3eOrganic ferroelectric diodes attract increasing interest as they combine non-destructive data read-out and low cost fabrication, two requirements in the development of novel non-volatile memory elements. The macroscopic electrical characteristics and performances of such devices strongly depend on their structural properties. Various studies of their global microscopic morphology have already been reported. Here, a multi-technique approach including different scanning force and X-ray microscopies permitted to reveal and locally study nanometer-scale unexpected sub-structures within a P(VDF-TrFE):F8BT ferroelectric diode. The strong impact of these structures on the local polarizability of the ferroelectric is shown. Two alternative fabrication methods are proposed that prevent the formation of these structures and demonstrate improved macroscopic device performances such as endurance and ON/OFF ratio.\u3c/p\u3

Using Embodied Multimodal Fusion to Perform Supportive and Instructive Robot Roles in Human-Robot Interaction

We present a robot that is working with humans on a common construction task. In this kind of interaction, it is important that the robot can perform different roles in order to realise an efficient collaboration. For this, we introduce embodied multimodal fusion, a new approach for processing data from the robot's input modalities. Using this method, we implemented two different robot roles: the robot can take the instructive role, in which the robot mainly instructs the user how to proceed with the construction; or the robot can take the supportive role, in which the robot hands over assembly pieces to the human that fit to the current progress of the assembly plan. We present a user evaluation that researches how humans react to the different roles of the robot. The main findings of this evaluation are that the users do not prefer one of the two roles of the robot, but take the counterpart to the robot's role and adjust their own behaviour according to the robot's actions. The most influential factors for user satisfaction in this kind of interaction are the number of times the users picked up a building piece without getting an explicit instruction by the robot, which had a positive influence, and the number of utterances the users made themselves, which had a negative influence. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

A Survey on Perception Methods for Human-Robot Interaction in Social Robots

10.1007/s12369-013-0199-6International Journal of Social Robotics6185-11