Metrics and benchmarks in human-robot interaction: Recent advances in cognitive robotics

International audienceRobots are having an important growing role in human social life, which requires them to be able to behave appropriately to the context of interaction so as to create a successful long-term human-robot relationship. A major challenge in developing intelligent systems , which could enhance the interactive abilities of robots, is defining clear metrics and benchmarks for the different aspects of human-robot interaction, like human and robot skills and performances, which could facilitate comparing between systems and avoid application-biased evaluations based on particular measures. The point of evaluating robotic systems through metrics and benchmarks, in addition to some recent frameworks and technologies that could endow robots with advanced cognitive and communicative abilities, are discussed in this technical report that covers the outcome of our recent workshop on current advances in cognitive robotics: Towards Intelligent Social Robots-Current Advances in Cognitive Robotics, in conjunction with the 15th IEEE-RAS Humanoids Conference-Seoul-South Korea-2015 (https://intelligent-robots-ws.ensta-paristech.fr/). Additionally, a summary of an interactive discussion session between the workshop participants and the invited speakers about different issues related to cognitive robotics research is reported

From Phoneme to Morpheme: A Computational Model

Zellig Harris proposed a method for grouping phonemes in an utterance into morphemes by simply using counts of each of the phonemes in a corpus relative to their position in sequences contained in the data set. Thus, using an n-gram model, one can model this process and see whether a computational model can actually group representations of phonemes into segments which correspond to morphemes. Here, we use a general n-gram modelling tool created for melodic grouping in music corpora and apply it to a natural language data set.We show that this method which approximates Harris’s can indeed find morphemes in a given language corpus by calculating the distributions of phonemes across a corpus

Perception of artificial agents and utterance friendliness in dialogue

Griffiths S, Eyssel FA, Philippsen A, Pietsch C, Wachsmuth S. Perception of artificial agents and utterance friendliness in dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction at the AISB Convention 2015. The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour; 2015.The present contribution investigates the construction of dialogue structure for the use in human-machine interaction especially for robotic systems and embodied conversational agents. We are going to present a methodology and findings of a pilot study for the design of task-specific dialogues. Specifically, we investigated effects of dialogue complexity on two levels: First, we examined the perception of the embodied conversational agent, and second, we studied participants’ performance following HRI. To do so, we manipulated the agent’s friendliness during a brief conversation with the user in a receptionist scenario. The paper presents an overview of the dialogue system, the process of dialogue construction, and initial evidence from an evaluation study with naïve users (N = 40). These users interacted with the system in a task-based dialogue in which they had to ask for the way in a building unknown to them. Afterwards participants filled in a questionnaire. Our findings show that the users prefer the friendly version of the dialogue which scored higher values both in terms of data collected via a questionnaire and in terms of data collected during the run of the experiment. Implications of the present research for follow-up studies are discussed, specifically focusing on the effects that dialogue features have on agent perception and on the user’s evaluation and performance

Disruption of Toxoplasma gondii Parasitophorous Vacuoles by the Mouse p47-Resistance GTPases

The p47 GTPases are essential for interferon-γ-induced cell-autonomous immunity against the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, in mice, but the mechanism of resistance is poorly understood. We show that the p47 GTPases, including IIGP1, accumulate at vacuoles containing T. gondii. The accumulation is GTP-dependent and requires live parasites. Vacuolar IIGP1 accumulations undergo a maturation-like process accompanied by vesiculation of the parasitophorous vacuole membrane. This culminates in disruption of the parasitophorous vacuole and finally of the parasite itself. Over-expression of IIGP1 leads to accelerated vacuolar disruption whereas a dominant negative form of IIGP1 interferes with interferon-γ-mediated killing of intracellular parasites. Targeted deletion of the IIGP1 gene results in partial loss of the IFN-γ-mediated T. gondii growth restriction in mouse astrocytes

Multiplex PCR and Next Generation Sequencing for the Non-Invasive Detection of Bladder Cancer

Highly sensitive and specific urine-based tests to detect either primary or recurrent bladder cancer have proved elusive to date. Our ever increasing knowledge of the genomic aberrations in bladder cancer should enable the development of such tests based on urinary DNA

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements