Ricerca – Caresses Robot – Italiano

6 new deliverables have been released

antonio — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 10:45:49 +0000

At the end of October, six new Deliverables have been released according to the CARESSES work plan:

D1.2, Basic guidelines for a culturally competent robot (Leader: Middlesex University)

D2.1 Report on cultural knowledge representation (Leader: University of Genova)

D3.1 Report on culturally sensitive planning (Leader: Orebro University)

D4.1 Report on robot-user verbal interaction (Leader: SoftBank Robotics Europe)

D4.2 Report on basic motions and perceptions (Leader: JAIST)

D5.1 Report on the integration of the cultural knowledge base (Leader: University of Genova)

Webinar presentation about CARESSES (EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, OCTOBER 10, 2017)

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 11:37:06 +0000

The pdf presentation of the Webinar “PAVING THE WAY TO CULTURALLY-COMPETENT ROBOTS: THE CARESSES PROJECT” (OCTOBER 10, 2017) organized by the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation.

Prof. Antonio Sgorbissa (EU Coordinator, University of Genova, Italy) and Prof. Nak Young Chong (Japan Coordinator, JAIST, Japan) introduce CARESSES.

Conference Article: Informative Sequential Selection of Variable-Sized Patches for Image Retrieval

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:51:19 +0000

Zhihao Shen, Hosun Lee, Sungmoon Jeong, Nak Young Chong, “Informative Sequential Selection of Variable-Sized Patches for Image Retrieval,” Proc. SICE Annual Conference, Kanazawa, Japan, September 19-22, 2017.

Conference Article: Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:50:55 +0000

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.

Barbara Bruno, Nak Young Chong, Hiroko Kamide, Sanjeev Kanoria, Jaeryoung Lee, Yuto Lim, Amit Kumar Pandey, Chris Papadopoulos, Irena Papadopoulos, Federico Pecora, Alessandro Saffiotti, Antonio Sgorbissa. Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper, RO-MAN2017, IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Lisbon, Portugal, 28-31 August 2017

Check a self-archived version here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319904421_Paving_the_Way_for_Culturally_Competent_Robots_a_Position_Paper

Conference Article: Encoding Cultures in Robot Emotion Representation

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:50:18 +0000

Cultural differences may influence interactions between humans with different social norms and cultural traits, incurring different emotional and behavioral responses. The same applies to human-robot interaction (HRI). We believe that controlling robot emotions based on the cultural context can help robots adapt to humans from culturally diverse backgrounds. Such culturally aligned robots are expected to be easily accepted by humans as part of daily life. In this paper, we aim at investigating the role of culture in representing robot emotions which are injected by humans during its early stage of development and subject to change through their own experience thereafter. Our experiments with social humanoid robots Pepper show that robots can learn to behave socially in alignment with an individual’s cultural background. Moreover, we have demonstrated that robots under the effect of different cultures can generate different behavioral responses to the same stimuli, which is considered one of the most important issues in socially assitive robotics.

Thi Le Quyen Dang, Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen, Sungmoon Jeong, Nak Young Chong. Encoding Cultures in Robot Emotion Representation, RO-MAN2017, IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Lisbon, Portugal, 28-31 August 2017

Journal Article: Caring robots are here to help

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:49:19 +0000

Nurse researchers and scientists developing culturally sensitive care robots say there is nothing to fear – in fact there’s much to be gained – from this technology. Robots, along with sensors and telemedicine, have been identified as technologies that can assist and prolong independent living for older people, with robots especially being used to help prevent social isolation and depression.

Irena Papadopoulos, Antonio Sgorbissa, Christina Koulouglioti, Caring robots are here to help, Nursing standard: official newspaper of the Royal College of Nursing 31(51):18-20, August 2017

Check a self-archived version here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319142683_Caring_robots_are_here_to_help_Nurse_researchers_and_scientists_developing_culturally_sensitive_care_robots_say_there_is_nothing_to_fear_-_in_fact_there%27s_much_to_be_gained_-_from_this_technology

Conference Article: Informative Sequential Patch Selection for Image Retrieval

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:48:54 +0000

To quickly and efficiently analyze a large-scale environment by the camera with limited field-of-view, intelligent systems should sequentially select the optimal field-of-view to observe important and informative parts of area. Especially in the image retrieval tasks, small observations could be sequentially selected to improve the performance of image retrieval with less computational costs than whole observations at once and the enhanced retrieval performance could be used to select the next best-view again in a cyclic process. In this paper, we have investigated the effects of selected image patches, which might be either overlapped with a certain ratio or non-overlapped with previous observations, in this cyclic process. The adaptive patch selection algorithm is also described as follows: (1) A current observation is decided by its own information gain model which is designed by a similarity value between current observed information and training dataset. (2) After then, the system will update the information gain model by discarding the irrelevant training data with the current observation. During this process, we have shown that an informative patch, even though a part of selected patch is already observed at previous steps, can enhance the retrieval accuracy and it has a better performance than an independent observation method. Experimental results also have shown that the model selects the informative patches around the important contents to retrieve the target images such as the sky, building and so on.

Zhihao Shen, Sungmoon Jeong, Hosun Lee, and Nak Young Chong, Informative Sequential Patch Selection for Image Retrieval, Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation (ICIA), Macau SAR, China, 18-20 July 2017 (Candidated to Best Paper Award).

Conference Article: Learning Human Behavior for Emotional Body Expression in Socially Assistive Robotics

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:48:30 +0000

Generating emotional body expressions for socially assistive robots has been gaining increased attention to enhance the engagement and empathy in human-robot interaction. In this paper, we propose a new model of emotional body expression for the robot inspired by social and emotional development of infant from their parents. An infant is often influenced by social referencing, meaning that they perceive their parents’ interpretation about emotional situations to form their own interpretation. Similar to the infant development case, robots can be designed to generate representative emotional behaviors using self-organized neural networks trained with various emotional behavior samples from human partners. We demonstrate the validity of our emotional behavior expression through a public human action dataset, which will facilitate the acquisition of emotional body expression of socially assistive robots.

Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen, Sungmoon Jeong, Nak Young Chong. Learning Human Behavior for Emotional Body Expression in Socially Assistive Robotics, URAI2017, International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence, Maison Glad Jeju, Jeju, Korea from June 28-July 1, 2017

Conference Article: Learning Social Relations for Culture Aware Interaction (Outstanding paper award)

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:47:28 +0000

Each person has their private physical and/or psychological area where they do not want to share with others during social interactions. This area gives them comfort about interactions and its size usually depends on various factors such as culture, personal traits, and acquaintanceship. This issue may also arise in case of human-robot interaction, especially when the robot is required to generate a socially competent interaction strategy toward people they are interacting with. Here, we propose a new robot exploration strategy to socially interact with people by considering the social relationship between the robot and each person. To that end, two definitions of interaction area are made: (1) Acceptable area allowed to be shared with other people and robots, and (2) Private area where a human does not want to be interfered by others. Based on these definitions, the robot can optimize the path to maximize the frequency/degree of visiting the acceptable area of each person and to minimize the frequency/degree of trespassing into the private area of them at the same time in an iterative way. In this paper, the social force model (SFM) of each person, based on the potential field concept, is designed by a fuzzy inference system and its parameter is optimized by the reinforcement learning model during interactions. We have shown that the proposed model can generate a suitable SFM of each person, which was quite similar to a ground truth model, allowing to plan a path to simultaneously optimize the two factors of interaction area, respectively.

Pakpoom Patompak, Sungmoon Jeong, Itthisek Nilkhamhang, Nak Young Chong, Learning Social Relations for Culture Aware Interaction, URAI2017, International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence, Maison Glad Jeju, Jeju, Korea from June 28-July 1, 2017.

Outstanding paper award

Conference Article: Bridging Between universAAL and ECHONET for Smart Home Environment

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:47:02 +0000

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) pursues the issues of how information and communication technology (ICT) is used to support the quality of life of the elderly and disabled people in smart home environment. Among the many AAL solutions, universAAL is one of the most open platforms that provides a holistic and standardized approach for an easy and economic development of AAL services. However, the compatibility with smart home networking systems that are based on ECHONET standard is not supported. Thus, this paper elucidates the bridging in between the universAAL and the ECHONET standard and thereby enable the attainment of novel AAL applications and services for ECHONET-based smart home automation systems.

Yuto Lim, Sin Yee Lim, Minh Dat Nguyen, Cheng Li, Yasuo Tan, Bridging Between universAAL and ECHONET for Smart Home Environment, URAI2017, International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence, Maison Glad Jeju, Jeju, Korea from June 28-July 1, 2017

Conference Article: A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:46:36 +0000

Cultural adaptation, i.e., the matching of a robot’s behaviours to the cultural norms and preferences of its user, is a well known key requirement for the success of any assistive application. However, culture-dependent robot behaviours are often implicitly set by designers, thus not allowing for an easy and automatic adaptation to different cultures. This paper presents a method for the design of culture-aware robots, that can automatically adapt their behaviour to conform to a given culture. We propose a mapping from cultural factors to related parameters of robot behaviours which relies on linguistic variables to encode heterogeneous cultural factors in a uniform formalism, and on fuzzy rules to encode qualitative relations among multiple variables. We illustrate the approach in two practical case studies.

Barbara Bruno, Fulvio Mastrogiovanni, Federico Pecora, Antonio Sgorbissa and Alessandro Saffiotti, A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic, FUZZ-IEEE 2017, IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, Naples, Italy, July 9-12, 2017

Conference Article: Modelling the Influence of Cultural Information on Vision-Based Human Home Activity Recognition

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:45:50 +0000

Daily life activities, such as eating and sleeping, are deeply influenced by a person’s culture, hence generating differences in the way a same activity is performed by individuals belonging to different cultures. We argue that taking cultural information into account can improve the performance of systems for the automated recognition of human activities. We propose four different solutions to the problem and present a system which uses a Naive Bayes model to associate cultural information with semantic information extracted from still images. Preliminary experiments with a dataset of images of individuals lying on the floor, sleeping on a futon and sleeping on a bed suggest that: i) solutions explicitly taking cultural information into account are more accurate than culture-unaware solutions; and ii) the proposed system is a promising starting point for the development of culture-aware Human Activity Recognition methods.

Roberto Menicatti, Barbara Bruno and Antonio Sgorbissa, Modelling the Influence of Cultural Information on Vision-Based Human Home Activity Recognition, URAI2017, International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence, Maison Glad Jeju, Jeju, Korea from June 28-July 1, 2017

Conference Article: The CARESSES EU-Japan project: making assistive robots culturally competent

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:45:09 +0000

The nursing literature shows that cultural competence is an important requirement for effective healthcare. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, that is, they should be aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and take these into account while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. The CARESSES project is an Europe-Japan collaborative effort that aims at designing, developing and evaluating culturally competent assistive robots. These robots will be able to adapt the way they behave, speak and interact to the cultural identity of the person they assist. This paper describes the approach taken in the CARESSES project, its initial steps, and its future plans.

Barbara Bruno, Nak Young Chong, Hiroko Kamide, Sanjeev Kanoria, Jaeryoung Lee, Yuto Lim, Amit Kumar Pandey, Chris Papadopoulos, Irena Papadopoulos, Federico Pecora, Alessandro Saffiotti, Antonio Sgorbissa, The CARESSES EU-Japan project: making assistive robots culturally competent, foritaal 2017, Ambient Assisted Living 8th Forum, Genova, Italy, June 12-15, 2017

Check a self-archived version here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319208231_The_CARESSES_EU-Japan_project_making_assistive_robots_culturally_competent

Journal Article: Perceived Comfortableness of Anthropomorphized Robots in U.S. and Japan

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:43:28 +0000

This study focuses on cultural differences in perceptions of comfortableness with robots that have either positive or negative anthropomorphic features. To clarify the effect of the valence of anthropomorphic features in addition to the effect of the number of features in different countries, this study investigated how Americans and Japanese perceive comfortableness with a positively or negatively featured robot. A total of 360 respondents (180 Americans and 180 Japanese) read a cover story about one robot. In the story, the valence and numbers of anthropomorphic features of the robot were manipulated and the respondents completed the comfortableness measurements including Comfort, Controllability and so on. The results demonstrated that Americans perceived more Comfort, Controllability, and Performance than did the Japanese respondents. The Americans show different levels of comfortableness perceptions in response to large number of features, and the Japanese respondents showed different levels of comfortableness in response to small number of features. We discuss the cultural background for the different patterns of perceived comfortableness between U.S. and Japan.

Hiroko Kamide and Tatsuo Arai, Perceived Comfortableness of Anthropomorphized Robots in U.S. and Japan, International Journal of Social Robotics, September 2017, Volume 9, Issue 4, pp 537–543, online since May 2017

Conference Article: Personalized Robot Emotion Representation through Retrieval of Memories (Best presentation award)

antonio — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:42:14 +0000

We present a robot emotion representation model by investigating the role of human-inspired social effects and memory retrieval process. Social referencing and social sharing are modeled as human guides to share knowledge and direct or influence robot emotion generation. The robot’s acquired knowledge is consolidated into a developmental memory architecture and used for future retrieval. This model enables robots interacting with their environment to learn from humans and form a human-like emotion generation process which helps to facilitate personalized human-robot interaction.

Thi Le Quyen Dang, Sungmoon Jeong, Nak Young Chong, “Personalized Robot Emotion Representation through Retrieval of Memories,” Proc. International Conference on Control, Automation, and Robotics, pp. 65-70, Nagoya, Japan, April 22-24, 2017.

Best Presentation Award