Computer Vision News - March 2022

14 Congrats, Doctor! Understanding the effects of the robot’s multi-modal behavior: Multi-modal behaviors made up of gaze mechanisms, which are turn-taking, turn- yielding, floor-holding, and joint attention, social gestures, which are emblem, deictic, and beat gestures, proxemics, through social navigation, and social dialogue were implemented autonomously and studied by extracting one modality in each condition and looking into behavioral outcomes and subjectivemeasurements. An extract of the system is shown inFigure2and thecodecan be found in my github/KarenTatarian . The data collection included 105 participants in a seven minutes interaction alone with the robot to investigate behavioral outcomes including but are not limited to distances of the users, speaking time, greetings performed, as well as backchannels. The study showed the extent of which each modality within the multi-modal behavior Using human behaviors for robot adaptation in group settings: Modalities are coupled in nature and for one to adapt to the changes in the environment it may need to rely on other sensory modalities. For instance, in my first thesis work, the robot would autonomously adapt its gaze pattern to social interaction changes, i.e groups being formed around it, based on its proxemics, which was used to estimate the roles of participants in group formations around the robot, such as active speaker, bystander, or overhearer (see Figure 1). A pilot study looked into group formations made of a robot and two users. Results showed that participants stood closer to the adaptive robot and ranked it higher in perceived adaptability and perceived sociability as well as feeling attended to by the robot in comparison to a robot that switched its gaze attention based on new sensory det ection [1] . Figure 1: Overview of two sets of interactions between the robot and participants forming a small group. The statuses represent each conversational role for each participant estimated by robot in different contexts and times during the interaction