arXiv subjects

Cynthia Breazeal

Publications and source records attributed to Cynthia Breazeal.

59 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Migratable AI: Personalizing Dialog Conversations with migration context

The migration of conversational AI agents across different embodiments in order to maintain the continuity of the task has been recently explored to further improve user experience. However, these migratable agents lack contextual understanding of the user information and the migrated device during the dialog conversations with the user. This opens the question of how an agent might behave when migrated into an embodiment for contextually predicting the next utterance. We collected a dataset from the dialog conversations between crowdsourced workers with the migration context involving personal and non-personal utterances in different settings (public or private) of embodiment into which the agent migrated. We trained the generative and information retrieval models on the dataset using with and without migration context and report the results of both qualitative metrics and human evaluation. We believe that the migration dataset would be useful for training future migratable AI systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

A Robotic Positive Psychology Coach to Improve College Students' Wellbeing

A significant number of college students suffer from mental health issues that impact their physical, social, and occupational outcomes. Various scalable technologies have been proposed in order to mitigate the negative impact of mental health disorders. However, the evaluation for these technologies, if done at all, often reports mixed results on improving users' mental health. We need to better understand the factors that align a user's attributes and needs with technology-based interventions for positive outcomes. In psychotherapy theory, therapeutic alliance and rapport between a therapist and a client is regarded as the basis for therapeutic success. In prior works, social robots have shown the potential to build rapport and a working alliance with users in various settings. In this work, we explore the use of a social robot coach to deliver positive psychology interventions to college students living in on-campus dormitories. We recruited 35 college students to participate in our study and deployed a social robot coach in their room. The robot delivered daily positive psychology sessions among other useful skills like delivering the weather forecast, scheduling reminders, etc. We found a statistically significant improvement in participants' psychological wellbeing, mood, and readiness to change behavior for improved wellbeing after they completed the study. Furthermore, students' personality traits were found to have a significant association with intervention efficacy. Analysis of the post-study interview revealed students' appreciation of the robot's companionship and their concerns for privacy.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Dyadic Speech-based Affect Recognition using DAMI-P2C Parent-child Multimodal Interaction Dataset

Automatic speech-based affect recognition of individuals in dyadic conversation is a challenging task, in part because of its heavy reliance on manual pre-processing. Traditional approaches frequently require hand-crafted speech features and segmentation of speaker turns. In this work, we design end-to-end deep learning methods to recognize each person's affective expression in an audio stream with two speakers, automatically discovering features and time regions relevant to the target speaker's affect. We integrate a local attention mechanism into the end-to-end architecture and compare the performance of three attention implementations -- one mean pooling and two weighted pooling methods. Our results show that the proposed weighted-pooling attention solutions are able to learn to focus on the regions containing target speaker's affective information and successfully extract the individual's valence and arousal intensity. Here we introduce and use a "dyadic affect in multimodal interaction - parent to child" (DAMI-P2C) dataset collected in a study of 34 families, where a parent and a child (3-7 years old) engage in reading storybooks together. In contrast to existing public datasets for affect recognition, each instance for both speakers in the DAMI-P2C dataset is annotated for the perceived affect by three labelers. To encourage more research on the challenging task of multi-speaker affect sensing, we make the annotated DAMI-P2C dataset publicly available, including acoustic features of the dyads' raw audios, affect annotations, and a diverse set of developmental, social, and demographic profiles of each dyad.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2016

Towards learning through robotic interaction alone: the joint guided search task

This work proposes a biologically inspired approach that focuses on attention systems that are able to inhibit or constrain what is relevant at any one moment. We propose a radically new approach to making progress in human-robot joint attention called "the joint guided search task". Visual guided search is the activity of the eye as it saccades from position to position recognizing objects in each fixation location until the target object is found. Our research focuses on the exchange of nonverbal behavior toward changing the fixation location while also performing object recognition. Our main goal is a very ambitious goal of sharing attention through probing synthetic foreground maps (i.e. what is being considered by the robotic agent) and the biological attention system of the human.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2016

NIMBUS: A Hybrid Cloud-Crowd Realtime Architecture for Visual Learning in Interactive Domains

Robotic architectures that incorporate cloud-based resources are just now gaining popularity. However, researchers have very few investigations into their capabilities to support claims of their feasibility. We propose a novel method to exchange quality for speed of response. Further, we back this assertion with empirical findings from experiments performed with Amazon Mechanical Turk and find that our method improves quality in exchange for response time in our cognitive architecture.

cs.RO↗