Papers by BERARDINA DE CAROLIS
With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been propose... more With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been proposed. Relevant examples range from the simple use of mobile apps and interactive displays to virtual and augmented reality settings. Recently social robots have been used as a solution to engage visitors in museum tours, due to their ability to interact with humans naturally and familiarly. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on the use of a social robot, Pepper in this case, as an innovative approach to engaging people during museum visiting tours. To this aim, we endowed Pepper with a vision module that allows it to perceive the visitor and the artwork he is looking at, as well as estimating his age and gender. These data are used to provide the visitor with recommendations about artworks the user might like to see during the visit. We tested the proposed approach in our research lab and preliminary experiments show its feasibility.
With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been propose... more With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been proposed. Relevant examples range from the simple use of mobile apps and interactive displays to virtual and augmented reality settings. Recently social robots have been used as a solution to engage visitors in museum tours, due to their ability to interact with humans naturally and familiarly. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on the use of a social robot, Pepper in this case, as an innovative approach to engaging people during museum visiting tours. To this aim, we endowed Pepper with a vision module that allows it to perceive the visitor and the artwork he is looking at, as well as estimating his age and gender. These data are used to provide the visitor with recommendations about artworks the user might like to see during the visit. We tested the proposed approach in our research lab and preliminary experiments show its feasibility.
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Attitude, Personality and Emotions in User-adapted Interaction. User Modeling 2001, Jul 1, 2001
The aim of our present research is to build an Agent capable of communicative and expressive beha... more The aim of our present research is to build an Agent capable of communicative and expressive behavior. The Agent should be able to plan not only what to communicate, but also by what (verbal or nonverbal) signals, in what combination and how synchronized. This depends on several factors:(i) consideration of the available modalities (eg, face, gaze, voice);(ii) cognitive ease of production and processing of signals;(iii) expressivity of each signal in communicating specific meanings;(iv) appropriateness of signals to social ...
In this paper, we describe an architecture supporting personalized interaction with information s... more In this paper, we describe an architecture supporting personalized interaction with information services available in public spaces. In particular, we focus the presentation on the personal user modeling agent that runs on the user mobile device and is able to exchange data with the environment in order to get personalized information.
Workshop From Objects to Agents, 2020
Interaction with an adaptive hypertext can be seen as a form of "goal-oriented" dialogu... more Interaction with an adaptive hypertext can be seen as a form of "goal-oriented" dialogue, where the user asks for information through a set of predefined queries and the system answers ensuring that the global communicative goal of the information process is achieved through a sequence of dialogue sections (hypermedia nodes). The system establishes what to say to the user at every turn of the dialogue based on the user model settings and on the interaction history. Planning on demand the information content of a hypertext node that responds to a particular link selection in a particular context requires a 'reactive' approach; this differs from common hypertext planning in that it applies local adjustment criteria to an overall plan and, in mixed-initiative situations, tries to fit together the system's and the user's points of view. Keywords Dynamic hypertext generation, mixed-initiative interaction, automated presentation of information. INTRODUCTION P...
Developing an embodied conversational agent that is able to exhibit a human-like behavior while c... more Developing an embodied conversational agent that is able to exhibit a human-like behavior while communicating with other virtual or human agents requires enriching a typical NLG architecture. The purpose of this paper is to describe our efforts in this direction and to illustrate our approach to the generation of an Agent that shows a personality, a social intelligence and is able to react emotionally to events occurring in the environment, consistently with its goals and with the context in which the conversation takes place. 1
Abstract. The AI*HCI workshop attempts to provide some answers on how AI can be used in the conte... more Abstract. The AI*HCI workshop attempts to provide some answers on how AI can be used in the context of HCI research community. Adaptation, personalization and user modeling have been the recurrent themes among the accepted papers. These themes have been investigated and applied to several domains such as tourism, museum visits, information presentation and virtual environment adaptation.This first edition of the workshop has eight accepted papers,
Social Assistive Robots are being used in therapeutic interventions for elderly people affected b... more Social Assistive Robots are being used in therapeutic interventions for elderly people affected by cognitive impairments. The present paper reports our research lines aiming at investigating the role of a social robot in aiding therapists during cognitive stimulation sessions for elders withMild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Dementia. We review our studies whose results show that social robots have been positively accepted by the seniors in different experiments. Participants were very attentive and involved in the sessions’ tasks and their experience was mainly positive. Our data suggest that this technology can be a valid tool to support psychotherapists in cognitive stimulation interventions emphasizing the need of multidisciplinary approaches combining assessment of behavior and robotics.
The main aim of our research is to investigate whether it is possible to find a relation between ... more The main aim of our research is to investigate whether it is possible to find a relation between the user’s mood and daily routines. To this aim we developed an application, Smart Calendar, that, thanks to its nature, allows collecting annotated datasets of mobile data, learning user daily routines and relating activities and pattern of sensor data to the user mood. Results of this preliminary phase of the research have shown that it is possible to learn routines and, if present, to find relations with the user mood.
Journal of e-learning and knowledge society, 2019
Social robots are being used successfully as educational technologies, playing roles of tutors an... more Social robots are being used successfully as educational technologies, playing roles of tutors and therapeutic assistants. In our research, we wish to explore how social robots can be used to tutor a second language to unaccompanied minor migrants and support their integration in a new culture. These young migrants are among those most at risk in the area of child and youth welfare. In this paper, we focus on a particular aspect of a second language teaching that concerns culture-related gestures that are important for supporting the social inclusion of these children. Since gesture learning relies on the understanding of the social situation, in which interaction and repeated practice are essential, social humanoid robots seem to be an adequate interaction mean since they can provide both examples of gesture executions and explanations about the meaning and the context in which the gesture should be used. Moreover, as in other assistive domains, social robots may be used to attract...
In this paper we propose an agent-based approach for controlling the behavior of a Smart Home Env... more In this paper we propose an agent-based approach for controlling the behavior of a Smart Home Environment that, based on the recognized situation and user goal, selects a suitable workflow for combining services of the environment. To this aim we have developed a butler agent that employs user and context modeling for supporting proactive adaptation of the interaction with the house. The user can interact with the proposed services by accepting, declining or changing them. Such a feedback is exploited by the learning component of the butler to refine the user model and improve its future behavior accordingly. In order to provide a description of how the system might work, a practical example is shown.
Touch Dynamics is the behavioral biometric trait that regards how the user interacts with devices... more Touch Dynamics is the behavioral biometric trait that regards how the user interacts with devices equipped with touch displays, the dynamic patterns drawn through the swipe movement can be used to identify the user who is accessing the smartphone. In this paper we investigated whether the same data could be used also to recognize some emotional states. To this aim, an Android App was designed to simulate the unlock patterns and collect data needed to calculate numeric features that have been used not only for identification purposes but also to classify three negative affective states: anxiety, stress and depression. Results obtained so far are encouraging and indicate that Random Forest is capable to reach good classification accuracy both on touch numerical features and on negative emotional states classification also exploiting behavior information such the hand and the finger used in the execution. Keywords—touch dynamics, swipe features, affective classification, emotions, mach...
Social robots are being used successfully as educational technologies. In this paper we propose t... more Social robots are being used successfully as educational technologies. In this paper we propose to use a social robot, Pepper in this case, to teach and explain the meaning of culture-related gestures to unaccompanied minor migrants and support their integration in a new culture. The use of social humanoid robots seems to be an adequate interaction mean to this aim, since they can provide both examples of gesture executions, explanations about the meaning and the context in which the gesture should be used. Moreover, as in other assistive domains, social robots may be used to attract the children’s attention and support the social operator in establishing contact with these children that very often, after the difficulties of the journey, do not trust adults. Results of a preliminary study, even if performed with a limited number of participants, show that the proposed approach is suitable for learning gestures.
The popularity of social robots is steadily increasing, mainly due to the interesting impact they... more The popularity of social robots is steadily increasing, mainly due to the interesting impact they have in several application domains. In this paper, we propose the use of Pepper Robot as an interface of a recommender system for tourism. In particular, we used the robot to interact with the users and to provide them with personalized recommendations about hotels, restaurants, and points of interest in the area. The personalization mechanism encoded in the social robot relies on soft biometrics traits automatically recognized by the robot, as age and gender, user interests and personal facets. All these data are used to feed a neural network that returns as output the most suitable recommendations for the target user. To evaluate the effectiveness of the interaction driven by a social robot, we carried out a user study whose goal was to evaluate: (1) how the robot affects the perceived accuracy of the recommendations; (2) how the user experience and the engagement vary by interacting...
International Journal of Social Robotics
In this paper, we investigate the use of a social robot as an engaging interface of a serious gam... more In this paper, we investigate the use of a social robot as an engaging interface of a serious game intended to make children more aware and well disposed towards waste recycle. The game has been designed as a competition between the robot Pepper and a child. During the game, the robot simultaneously challenges and teaches the child how to recycle waste materials. To endow the robot with the capability to play as a game opponent in a real-world context, it is equipped with an image recognition module based on a Convolutional Neural Network to detect and classify the waste material as a child would do, i.e. by simply looking at it. A formal experiment involving 51 primary school students is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the game in terms of different factors such as the interaction with the robot, the users’ cognitive and affective dimensions towards ecological sustainability, and the propensity to recycle. The obtained results are encouraging and draw promising scenari...
Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
Recent studies show that children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more exposed to ... more Recent studies show that children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more exposed to pathologies related to obesity and lack of movement. Moreover, they are approximately twice as likely to die from drowning than neurotypical ones. Therefore, acquiring good water safety skills is of extreme importance and, at the same time, aquatic activities are a valid opportunity to do some physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviors. "iBall to Swim is a serious game, based on IoT, that through a playful approach allows children with ASD to do activities in an aquatic environment, developing and improving motor skills. The system is made of a swimming ball augmented with lighting, a wetsuit with a heartbeat monitor and wireless bone conduction headphones. A mobile application is used to integrate these components and to measure and monitor the child's performance. To test whether the technology contributed to improve children's motor skills, we performed a test with eleven children with ASD. Their improvement in motor skills has been studied during a water training phase both with the help of the serious game and without. Results show that there was a general improvement in their performance and children were keeping swimming autonomously and for a longer distance when they were stimulated by the game. Furthermore, the children reported enjoyment and the parents asked whether the game could be used routinely with their children. These encouraging findings suggest that "iBall to Swim is a promising way to enhance the learning of the basic notions of swimming and it can be considered a valid tool to help to improve ASD children's health and wellbeing.
Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization - UMAP'19 Adjunct, 2019
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Papers by BERARDINA DE CAROLIS