Research Projects
SPRING project (EC H2020): social robotics for elder-care (2020-2024)
Please see https://spring-h2020.eu/about-spring/
PIs: Oliver Lemon and Christian Dondrup
Duration: 48 months
MuMMER (EC H2020): Multimodal Mall Entertainment Robot (2016-2020)
We developed a humanoid robot (based on Aldebaran's Pepper platform) able to engage and interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environments of a public shopping mall, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the general public. Using co-design methods, we worked with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers, to develop truly engaging robot behaviours, including telling jokes and playing games, as well as providing guidance, information, and collecting customer feedback. Crucially, our robot exhibita behaviour that is socially appropriate, combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we developed and integrated new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. Throughout the project, the robot was deployed in a large public shopping mall in Finland.
PI: Oliver Lemon
Duration: 48 months
Amazon Alexa Challenge 2017 & 2018
PIs: Verena Rieser, Oliver Lemon
Duration: 11/2016 - 11/2017; 02/2018-12/2018
website: here
Funded by Amazon.
MIRIAM
PI: Helen Hastie
Duration: 1/6/2017 - 12/12/2017
Website: here
Collaborators: SeeByte and Tekever
Funded by Dstl.
LUCINE - Learning User preferenCes by INtEraction (DataLab, EPSRC Impact Acecleration)
PI: Verena Rieser
Duration: 12/2016 - 07/2018
Collaborative Innovation project with EmoTech LTD.
Funded by the DataLab and EPSRC Impact Acceleration
MaDrIgAL: MultiDimensional Interaction management and Adaptive Learning (EPSRC)
PI: Verena Rieser
Research Co-I: Simon Keizer
Duration: 06/2016 - 05/2019
Grant number: EP/N017536/1
website: here
Joint project with Prof. Harry Bunt (University of Tilburg, NL), Dr. Norbert Pfleger (SemVox GmbH, DE)
DILiGENt: Domain-Independent Language Generation (EPSRC)
PI: Verena Rieser
Duration: 03/2015 - 02/2018
Grant number: EP/M005429/1
EPSRC website: here
Project poster: here
Joint project with London Media Technology Campus (UCL/BBC Sebastian Riedel, Co-I) and University of Sheffield (Andreas Vlachos, Co-I).
Past Projects:
Emote (EC FP7)
The EMOTE project will design, develop and evaluate a new generation of artificial embodied tutors that have perceptive capabilities to engage in empathic interactions with learners in a shared physical space.Co-I Helen HastieDuration: 36 months
Generation for Uncertain Information (EPSRC)
PI: Verena Rieser, Grant number: EP/L026775/1
BABBLE: domain-general methods for learning natural spoken dialogue systems (EPSRC)
PI: Oliver Lemon
Researcher Co-I: Arash Eshghi
Duration: 04/2015 - 10/2017
Grant number: EP/M01553X/1 : EPSRC website
Website: here
REGIME: REport GeneratIon from Metat-Data (Dstl funded under the ASUR programme)
PI: Helen Hastie
Duration: 11/15-11/16
Joint project with SeeByte and Thales
The two main barriers to wide spread adoption of autonomous unmanned systems are the lack of trust in the systems and information overload of operators and personnel. REGIME will investigate natural language report generation techniques to address these issues, optimising situation awareness during and post mission and ensuring that the rationale behind autonomous systems’ decisions is completely transparent- this is particularly important for underwater vehicles where bandwidth is limited.
This Project is on hyperlocal interactive search (2011-2014).
Official website http://www.parlance-project.eu
Collaborative website (needs login)
SpeechCity Impact Acceleration Grant
ECHOES (ESRC/EPSRC): virtual characters for children with autism
ECHOES: ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning (2008-2011)
Official website: http://echoes2.org
ECHOES II aims to develop an adventurous technology- enhanced learning environment in which both typically developing children and children with Aspergers Syndrome at Key Stage 1 (ages 5-7) can explore and improve social interaction and collaboration skills. The environment will also serve as a tool for researchers, teachers, parents, and practitioners to investigate problems that children may encounter in specific social contexts and the ways in which those problems may be addressed.
The technology-enhanced learning environment will combine existing technologies in new ways. With the active participation of user groups, we will combine interactive multitouch screens, gesture and gaze tracking, and intelligent agent-based context-sensitive interfaces to create a novel interactive multi-modal environment that can be adapted to the needs of specific individuals, and that can provide new ways of investigating and supporting the development of social skills in children.
ABC-POMDP (EPSRC): belief state compression for POMDP dialogue models
"Scaling up Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems for real user goals using automatic belief state compression" (2009-2012)
Grant number: EP/G069840/1
Project web site: http://sites.google.com/site/abcpomdp
Principal Investigator: Prof. Oliver Lemon
Co-Investigator: Dr. Paul Crook
Co-PI: Dr. Jesse Hoey.
SpaceBook (EC FP7): conversational speech applications for smart city exploration
EC FP7 2011-2014
The SB wiki: http://www.spacebook-project.eu/wiki/Main_Page
The email list: spacebook-all@cs.umu.se.
The SB website: http://spacebook-project.eu/
EC FP7 2011-2014
Project page (internal)
The H4M "wiki": http://www.help4mood.info/KB/main.aspx
JAMES (EC FP7): socially intelligent Human-Robot Interaction
EC FP7 2011-2014, project no. 270435
Classic project (EC FP7): Computational Learning in Adaptive Systems for Spoken Conversation
TALK project: Tools for Ambient Linguistic Knowledge (EC FP6): in-car spoken dialogue systems (with BMW, Bosch)
