Invited Speakers

Speaker-Bio: She is currently Assistant Professor at Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e Tecnologie dell'Informazione - DIETI, University of Naples "Federico II", Italy.

Co-chief manager of the PRISCA (Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Cognitive System Projects) lab.

Coordinator and Principal Investigator of the National Project UPA4SAR "User-centred Profiling and Adaptation for Socially Assistive Robotics".

She received the M.Sc. degree in Physics from University of Naples Federico II, Italy, in 2001, and the Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2006. During her career, she was research assistant at the Division on Cognitive and Communication Technologies - ITC-irst (Italy), at the institute of Cybernetics E. Caianiello - CNR (Italy), and visiting researcher at the Center for Human-Computer Communication - Oregon Health and Science University, Oregon (USA).

Her research interests include Multi-agent Systems, Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Architectures and Behavior-based Robotics and User Profiling and Recommender Systems.

While the design of humanoid robots’ emotional behaviors has attracted many researchers, the possibility to automatically understand users’ perception and responses to these emotional behaviors, or to the robot behavior in general, is often neglected. Recognition of cues modeling the user state and the social aspects of the interaction is still at an early stage since it requires the capabilities to recognize complex and multi-modal perceptions of the interaction. Indeed, non-verbal cues are the most used channel of communication, but they can also be used by a robot to assess the acceptability, comfort, and likeability of the human-robot co-existence. In this talk, current approaches dealing with engagement or distraction recognition are discussed. Moreover, the ability for a robot to adapt its behavior according to possible human reactions and individual preferences will be discussed, since it will determine the success and large-scale use of such social machines.

Speaker-Bio : She is currently a researcher at the Group on Media Technologies (GTM) working in the area of Human-Robot Interaction. She graduated on Computer Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on 2003 and then started her PhD at the Institut d´Investigació en Intelligència Artificial (IIIA-CSIC) where she had the opportunity to work with robots for the first time. On 2008 she moved to Toulouse as a Marie-Curie fellow to work in the area of HRI at the Laboratoire d´Analyse et d´Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS-CNRS). After a great experience working with robots in collaboration with humans she moved to Imperial College London (Personal Robotics Lab) to continue her research on social robots in educational environments. She next decided to try industry and make a pause in academia, and worked at Cambridge Consultants as user-center designer. After all these years she discovered that her research ambition is focused on studying human-robot interaction and its interdisciplinary connection with cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, health and education, with emphasis on long-term interaction. Moreover, at La Salle her role is to expand the current offer in robotics both in research and teaching.

Motivation plays an important role in humans by promoting adherence to therapy treatment, improving task performance or encouraging behavioural change. Motivation could be either intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation has been demonstrated to be more effective for long-term tasks and behavioural change, whereas extrinsic motivation has shown to be more effective for short-term task compliance. Positive encouragement and strong engagement are key factors for increasing intrinsic motivation in humans to perform a task or achieve a behavioural change. In this talk, we will examine the role of motivation and its underlying mechanisms to facilitate engagement in long-term tasks with socially assistive robots. More precisely, we will discuss the use of 'role-switching' as an intrinsic motivational mechanism to increase engagement in a healthy-habits acquisition framework.