Talk by Iolanda Leite & André Pereira, KTH

As social robots move out of controlled laboratory environments to be deployed in the real world, a long-standing barrier is the need to respond and adapt to both users and to the dynamics of the environment over long periods of time. In this talk, I will present my past and current research towards enabling robots with the capabilities that will enable them to engage users (and in particular children) over repeated interactions. I will also discuss limitations of the current state of the art in robotic technology suitable for realistic social environments, arguing that an improved understanding of how robots perceive, reason and act depending on their surrounding social context can lead to more natural, enjoyable and useful human-robot interactions in the long-term.

Evoking a sense of social presence is the goal of many types of media. We first started representing others through carving on stone sculptures and have since evolved to using books, movies, and highly realistic interactive experiences. If considered socially present, characters controlled by artificial intelligence have the potential of evoking the same type of social responses from us. In this talk, I will focus on my current and previous research that contributes to creating interactive agents that are perceived as socially present. This research comprises in simulating social capabilities in robots and in using extra devices or remotely controlled interfaces to solve some of today’s limitations in social robotics.

Bio:

Iolanda Leite is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She holds a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from IST, University of Lisbon. Prior to joining KTH, she was a Research Assistant at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group at INESC-ID Lisbon, a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Social Robotics Lab and an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. Iolanda’s research interests are in the areas of Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. She aims to develop autonomous socially intelligent robots that can assist people, in particular children, over long periods of time.

André Pereira is an Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Before joining KTH, he was leading the software team at Furhat Robotics, was a Senior Research Associate at Disney Research and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Social Robotics Lab. André started his professional career at INESC-ID, IST Technical University of Lisbon where he finished his Ph.D. and worked as a Research Assistant on the topic of improving social presence in human-agent interaction. As a game designer and co-founder of Tabletip Games, he also designed and published several board games for different International markets. His passion is to design, develop and evaluate novel interactive experiences enabled by state-of-the-art technology.