Gabriella Cortellessa

GiraffPlus: Combining social interaction and long term monitoring for promoting independent living

Early detection and adaptive support to changing individual needs related to ageing is an important challenge in todays society. In this paper we present a system called GiraffPlus that aims at addressing such a challenge and is developed in an on-going European project. The system consists of a network of home sensors that can be automatically configured to collect data for a range of monitoring services; a semi-autonomous telepresence robot; a sophisticated context recognition system that can give high-level and long term interpretations of the collected data and respond to certain events; and personalized services delivered through adaptive user interfaces for primary users. The system performs a range of services including data collection and analysis of long term trends in behaviors and physiological parameters (e.g. relating to sleep or daily activity); warnings, alarms and reminders; and social interaction through the telepresence robot. The latter is based on the Giraff telepresence robot, which is already in place in a number of homes. A distinctive aspect of the project is that the GiraffPlus system will be installed and evaluated in at least 15 homes of elderly people. This paper provides a general overview of the GiraffPlus system and its evaluation.

MONITORING ELDERLY PEOPLE WITH THE ROBOCARE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT: INTERACTION SYNTHESIS AND USER EVALUATION

This article describes aspects of a fully implemented artificial intelligence (AI) system that integrates multiple intelligent components to actively assist an elderly person at home. Specifically, we describe how constraint‐based scheduling technology is used to actively monitor a pattern of activities executed by the person and how detected temporal constraint violations are used to trigger meaningful and contextualized proactive interactions. This article also presents a psychological evaluation of the system focusing on elderly peoples attitudes, in which system acceptability, perceived utility, interaction modality, and emotional response are considered.

Mexar2: AI Solves Mission Planner Problems

Deep-space missions carry an ever larger set of different and complementary onboard payloads. Each payload generates data, and synthesizing it for optimized downlinking is one way to reduce the ratio of mission costs to science return. This is the main role of the Mars-Express scheduling architecture (Mexar2), an Al-based tool in daily use on the Mars-Express mission since February 2005. Mexar2 supports space mission planners continuously as they plan data downlinks from the spacecraft to Earth. The tool lets planners work at a higher abstraction level while it performs low-level, often-repetitive tasks. It also helps them produce a plan rapidly, explore alternative solutions, and choose the most robust plan for execution. Additionally, planners can analyze any problems over multiple days and identify payload overcommitments that cause resource bottlenecks and increase the risk of data losses. Mexar2 has significantly increased the data return over the whole Mars-Express mission duration. Its effectively become a work companion for mission planners at the European Space Agencys European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

A Constraint-Based Architecture for Flexible Support to Activity Scheduling

The O-OSCAR software architecture is a problem solving environment for complex scheduling problem that is based on a constraint-basedrep resentation. On top of this core representation a problem solver module and a schedule execution system guarantee a complete support to address a scheduling problem. Furthermore, a rather sophisticated interaction module allows users to maintain control on different phases of schedule management.

MrSPOCK—STEPS IN DEVELOPING AN END-TO-END SPACE APPLICATION

This article elaborates around a recent effort to build a planning system that helps human mission planning in a space mission. Specifically, the article describes the steps that brought us to develop MrSPOCK, the MARS EXPRESS Science Plan Opportunities Coordination Kit, a tool for supporting long‐term planning in the MARS EXPRESS mission of the European Space Agency. In showing our effort for creating MrSPOCK, we will underscore the key ingredients for developing complete applications and how they are connected to a stable line of research on planning and scheduling with timelines.

Proactive assistive technology: an empirical study

This paper analyzes the problem of evaluating elderly peoples perception of assistive robots and domotic environments. Specifically, we focus on aspects related to the modalities in which interaction can occur between an elder user and an assistive robotic agent. Our work benefits from the products of project ROBOCARE, namely, a domestic environment in which sensors, intelligent software components and a domestic robot provide a set of cognitive support services for the elder user. This paper analyzes a number of evaluation criteria in detail, specifically related to the robots aspect, the way in which it communicates with the user, and the perceived usefulness of its support services. Among these criteria, the paper proposes and reports an evaluation of the Proactive interaction modality (where the system takes the initiative) and On-demand interaction (in which the user explicitly requests a service). Users evaluate the On-demand support services in personal safety scenarios as particularly useful, and less so in scenarios which are not critical. The paper also provides a discussion which can be useful for the design of future assistive agents and robotic companions.

Generating high quality schedules for a spacecraft memory downlink problem

This work introduces a combinatorial optimization problem called MARS EXPRESS Memory Dumping Problem (MEX-MDP), which arises in the European Space Agency program MARS EXPRESS. It concerns the generation of high quality schedules for the spacecraft memory downlink problem. MEX-MDP is an NP-hard combinatorial problem characterized by several kinds of constraints, such as on-board memory capacity, limited communication windows over the downlink channel, deadlines and ready times on the observation activities. The contribution of this paper is twofold: on one hand it provides a CSP model of a real problem, and on the other it presents a set of metaheuristic strategies based on local and randomized search which are built around the constraint-based model of the problem. The algorithms are evaluated on a benchmark set distilled from ESA documentation and the results are compared against a lower bound of the objective function. This work describes results obtained in the framework of a research study conducted for the European Space Agency (ESA-ESOC) under contract No.14709/00/D/IM.

Evaluating Telepresence Robots in the Field

Most robotic systems are usually used and evaluated in laboratory setting for a limited period of time. The limitation of lab evaluation is that it does not take into account the different challenges imposed by the fielding of robotic solutions into real contexts. Our current work evaluates a robotic telepresence platform to be used with elderly people. This paper describes our effort toward a comprehensive, ecological and longitudinal evaluation of such robots. Specifically, the paper highlights open points related to the transition from laboratory to real world settings. It first discusses some results from a short term evaluation performed in Italy, obtained by interviewing 44 healthcare workers as possible clients (people connecting to the robot) and 10 older adults as possible end users (people receiving visits through the robot). It then describes a complete evaluation plan designed for a long term assessment also dwelling on the initial application of such methodology to test sites, finally it introduces some technical features that could enable a more robust real world deployment.

Developing a smart environment for crisis management training

Despite the growth of advanced communication technologies, smart devices etc. the main approach to training strategic planners for crisis management (Gold Commanders) continues to be a paper-based, collective group dynamic exercise. The Pandora project has developed an advanced smart environment for the training of Gold Commanders which uses AI planning techniques to provide a crisis scenario modelled as an event network. This includes points of decision for trainees managed by automated rules from a knowledge base, behavioural modelling of the trainees, and ambient management of the environment to provide affective inputs to control and manage trainee stress. In this context, the system controls and reacts to trainee performance in relation to the events and decision points and can dynamically remodel and reconfigure the event network to respond appropriately to trainee decisions. Trainees can also be pressurised through compression of the timelines or ambient management of the multimedia information presented within the environment, causing them to make decisions under stress or with inadequate information. The environment can also represent any missing trainees within the scenario, which provides the potential to offer a completely autonomous facility for scenario design and test, and potentially a decision support facility, based on a build-up of empirical evidence from real world and training situations. In summary, the Pandora system integrates its computational intelligence, with the intelligence of the trainer and the trainees, to provide an emotionally engaging, augmented reality/virtual reality training environment for crisis managers.

Assessing affective response of older users to a telepresence robot using a combination of psychophysiological measures

Telepresence robots can become a beneficial tool in home care assistance and rehabilitation services by helping elderly people to remain in their homes longer. They can represent an additional means to assist older adults and facilitate social interaction by creating a support network through which nursing staff and family members can collaborate. This article describes a feasibility study relatively to the use of such robots in the interaction with elderly people affected by Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The paper aims at assessing the psychophysiological response of such users to the presence of the robotic platform in order to use it as an indication of the level of tolerance toward the platform. To this purpose, we have involved 9 healthy and 8 MCI older adults in the participation of an experimental study where they have been asked to perform repeated interactions with and without the telepresence robot. We based our analysis on a combination of psychological tests to assess anxiety, positive/negative effects of the interaction with the robot, and we performed physiological measurements (heart rate and heart rate variability) to obtain an objective measure of the actual psychological state. Results seem to suggest that the robot presence is satisfactorily tolerated by MCI and that it does not cause adverse effects in term of cardiovascular response, thus encouraging further investigation on telepresence robots for rehabilitation and care experimental studies.