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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
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Coordinator: Alexandros Potamianos (Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies, Greece)
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Other partners: Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece), The University of Hertfordshire Higher Education Corporation (UK), Universitaet Bielefeld (Germany), Kunlgliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (Sweden), Blue Ocean Robotics ApS (Denmark), Univ. Lille (France), Furhat Robotics AB (Sweden)
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Abstract: The crowning achievement of human communication is our unique ability to share intentionality, create and execute on joint plans. Using this paradigm we model human-robot communication as a three step process: sharing attention, establishing common ground and forming shared goals. Prerequisites for successful communication are being able to decode the cognitive state of people around us (mindreading) and building trust. Our main goal is to create robots that analyze and track human behavior over time in the context of their surroundings (situational) using audio-visual monitoring in order to establish common ground and mind-reading capabilities. On BabyRobot we focus on the typically developing and autistic spectrum children user population. Children have unique communication skills, are quick and adaptive learners, eager to embrace new robotic technologies. This is especially relevant for special eduation where the development of social skills is delayed or never fully develops without intervention or therapy. Thus our second goal is to define, implement and evaluate child-robot interaction application scenarios for developing specific socio-affective, communication and collaboration skills in typically developing and autistic spectrum children. We will support not supplant the therapist or educator, working hand-inhand to create a low risk environment for learning and cognitive development. Breakthroughs in core robotic technologies are needed to support this research mainly in the areas of motion planning and control in constrained spaces, gestural kinematics, sensorimotor learning and adaptation. Our third goal is to push beyond the state-of-the-art in core robotic technologies to support natural human-robot interaction and collaboration for edutainment and healthcare applications. Creating robots that can establish communication protocols and form collaboration plans on the fly will have impact beyond the application scenarios investigated here.
Collaborations in European Programs, Except FP7 & H2020
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Project title: Interactively Grounded Language Understanding
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Other partners: UMONS (Belgique), Inria (France), Univ-Lille (France), KTH (sweden), Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)
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Abstract: Language is an ability that develops in young children through joint interaction with their caretakers and their physical environment. At this level, human language understanding could be referred as interpreting and expressing semantic concepts (e.g. objects, actions and relations) through what can be perceived (or inferred) from current context in the environment. Previous work in the field of artificial intelligence has failed to address the acquisition of such perceptually-grounded knowledge in virtual agents (avatars), mainly because of the lack of physical embodiment (ability to interact physically) and dialogue, communication skills (ability to interact verbally). We believe that robotic agents are more appropriate for this task, and that interaction is a so important aspect of human language learning and understanding that pragmatic knowledge (identifying or conveying intention) must be present to complement semantic knowledge. Through a developmental approach where knowledge grows in complexity while driven by multimodal experience and language interaction with a human, we propose an agent that will incorporate models of dialogues, human emotions and intentions as part of its decision-making process. This will lead anticipation and reaction not only based on its internal state (own goal and intention, perception of the environment), but also on the perceived state and intention of the human interactant. This will be possible through the development of advanced machine learning methods (combining developmental, deep and reinforcement learning) to handle large-scale multimodal inputs, besides leveraging state-of-the-art technological components involved in a language-based dialog system available within the consortium. Evaluations of learned skills and knowledge will be performed using an integrated architecture in a culinary use-case, and novel databases enabling research in grounded human language understanding will be released.