The Recognition of Engagement in Human-Robot Dialogs

In this talk I will discuss research we have been conducting on the recognition of engagement and a re-usable module for engagement recognition in human-robot dialogs. I will discuss observations from studying human-human dialogues in which people undertake tasks that not only require them to discuss and collaborate but also to make use of deictic gestures and mutual facial gaze. We use these observations to define connection events and then discuss a re-usable module for recognition of such events by a robot. I will demonstrate results of our efforts in the «pointing game.»

Speaker Bios

Candy Sidner has a long standing interest in human communication and collaboration, and their application to agents, robots, and interfaces, especially those using gesture, social behavior, speech, and natural language. She is a Research Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a Division scientist at BAE Systems AIT.She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a senior member of the IEEE. She serves as an associate editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence, on the scientific advisory boards of IUI, SIGDIAL and HLT-NAACL. She has served as general chair for HLT-NAACL 2007, program co-chair of Intelligent User Interfaces 2006, SIGIAL 2004, chair of Intelligent User Interfaces in 2001, and President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1989). She received her Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Candy Sidner
Affiliation:
Worcester Polytechnic Institute