Andreea I. Niculescu

Making Social Robots More Attractive: The Effects of Voice Pitch, Humor and Empathy

In this paper we explore how simple auditory/verbal features of the spoken language, such as voice characteristics (pitch) and language cues (empathy/humor expression) influence the quality of interaction with a social robot receptionist. For our experiment two robot characters were created: Olivia, the more extrovert, exuberant, and humorous robot with a higher voice pitch and Cynthia, the more introvert, calmer and more serious robot with a lower voice pitch. Our results showed that the voice pitch seemed to have a strong influence on the way users rated the overall interaction quality, as well as the robot’s appeal and overall enjoyment. Further, the humor appeared to improve the users’ perception of task enjoyment, robot personality and speaking style while the empathy showed effects on the way users evaluated the robot’s receptive behavior and the interaction ease. With our study, we would like to stress in particular the importance of voice pitch in human robot interaction and to encourage further research on this topic.

Manipulating stress and cognitive load in conversational interactions with a multimodal system for crisis management support

The quality assessment of multimodal conversational interfaces is influenced by many factors. Stress and cognitive load are two of most important. In the literature, these two factors are considered as being related and accordingly summarized under the single concept of ‘cognitive demand’. However, our assumption is that even if they are related, these two factors can still occur independently. Therefore, it is essential to control their levels during the interaction in order to determine the impact that each factor has on the perceived conversational quality. In this paper we present preliminary experiments in which we tried to achieve a factor separation by inducing alternating low/high levels of both stress and cognitive load. The stress/cognitive load levels were manipulated by varying task difficulty, information presentation and time pressure. Physiological measurements, performance metrics, as well as subjective reports were deployed to validate the induced stress and cognitive load levels. Results showed that our manipulations were successful for the cognitive load and partly for the stress. The levels of both factors were better indicated by subjective reports and performance metrics than by physiological measurements.

Designing IDA - An Intelligent Driver Assistant for Smart City Parking in Singapore

A current problem modern cities are facing is the increased traffic flow and heavily congested parking places. To reduce the time and traffic caused by finding available parking we propose IDA, an Intelligent Driver Assistant. The main objective of IDA is to help drivers to find suitable park places, to online monitor car park availability and to redirect drivers when the number of free available spots drops to a critical level. Unlike other parking applications, IDA uses speech to interact with the driver and becomes an active helper during the navigation process by adjusting dynamically the parking decisions based on the traffic situation. The paper presents the current work in progress, interaction design aspects, uses cases, as well as a first user feedback received during a public event where IDA was showcased.

SARA: Singapore’s Automated Responsive Assistant, A Multimodal Dialogue System for Touristic Information

In this paper we describe SARA, a multimodal dialogue system offering touristic assistance for visitors coming to Singapore. The system is implemented as an Android mobile phone application and provides information about local attractions, restaurants, sightseeing, direction and transportation services. SARA is able to detect the user’s location on a map by using a GPS integrated module and accordingly can provide real-time orientation and direction help. To communicate with SARA users can use speech, text or scanned QR code. Input/output modalities for SARA include natural language in form of speech or text. A short video about the main features of our Android application can be seen at: http://vimeo.com/91620644. Currently, the system supports only English, but we are working towards a multi-lingual input/output support. For test purposes we also created a web version of SARA that can be tested for Chinese and English text input/output at: http://iris.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/StatTour/.

Multi-robot collaborative platforms for humanitarian relief actions

In this paper we describe the main components and technical challenges required for the implementation of a multi-robot collaboration platform towards supporting humanitarian relief actions. The platform supports collaborative work between a fleet of UAVs, mobile stations and light-weight fast-speed robots. The platform can be used on both land or marine environments allowing a wide diversity of rescue, surveillance and relief operations. The paper presents the entire robotic system of the platform along with some mobile station-base collaborative tasks, inter UAVs and fast-speed mobile platform collaboration. Finally, we present potential application scenarios where these platforms can be deployed.

CLARA: A Multifunctional Virtual Agent for Conference Support and Touristic Information

In this paper we present a multifunctional conversational agent which combines natural language search capabilities for two different domain applications: a conference information system and local tourist guide. The paper describes the corpora, architecture, algorithm, and the mobile application created to interact with the users. Finally, some results obtained when using the proposed system in the context of an international scientific conference held in Singapore in September 2014 with more than 1200 assistants are provided.

Design and evaluation of a conversational agent for the touristic domain

This paper focuses on the design and evaluation of SARA, a conversational agent for the touristic domain featuring a high number of different, unique characteristics: spoken dialogue interaction, dialogue orchestration, context dependent information, an animated avatar and support for different kind of dialogue types, i.e. chat, specific and general question-answering, task oriented dialogues. The agent has currently two implementations: as web client and as mobile phone application. The paper describes the modules and resources required for running the agent on both interfaces, as well as the evaluation results obtained from two assessment studies concerning the interaction design of these two agent interfaces. The feedback gathered from the studies will enable us to improve the applications in terms of service, performance and usability.

Socializing with Olivia, the youngest robot receptionist outside the lab

In this paper we present the evaluation results of an exploratory study performed in an open environment with the robot receptionist Olivia. The main focus of the study was to analyze relationships between the robots social skills and the perceived overall interaction quality, as well as to determine additional important interaction quality features with potential general validity. Our results show positive correlations between the investigated factors, as the ability to socialize with humans achieved the second highest correlation with the perceived interaction quality. One of the most relevant functional aspects for the interaction quality was found to be the ability to respond fast. Performance abilities, such as speech or object recognition were, surprisingly, considered less important. The voice pleasantness was regarded as one of the most important non-functional aspects being ranked higher than a nice physical appearance.

Designing Humour in Interaction

Humour in interaction design has received limited attention in design and HCI conferences. In this paper, we present the results of a workshop on humor design conducted at a human-computer interaction (HCI) conference with professional designers and researchers. The workshop goals were to understand perceptions, design principles and methods for creating humour in HCI. The objective of our paper is to communicate to the design community the main ideas born during the workshop, as well as opportunities for deploying successfully humor in HCI. We believe, our work contributes in bringing to the fore a lesser known knowledge area of designing interactions that not only deliver more positive feelings to users, but also can be effectively used in changing human behaviour.

Technologies for the future: Evaluating a voice enabled smart city parking application

In this paper, we present an evaluation study of a smart parking application prototype that assists drivers with real-time information. The system brings a new contribution beyond the state of the art by adding two novel features: the use of natural language and the ability to react in real-time to changes in parking occupancy. A group of 5 experts evaluated the prototype using Nielsens set of heuristics in a think-loud approach. Results and implications for further design are presented. The prototype evaluation is considered within the broader context of smart city.