Aly Amir

El Shorouk Academy · archieteture

This paper presents an exploratory study designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that investigates children's awareness of being imitated by a robot in a play/game scenario. The Nao robot imitates all the arm movement behaviors of the child in real-time in dyadic and triadic interactions. Different behavioral criteria (i.e., eye...

Imitation plays an important role in development, being one of the precursors of social cognition. Even though some children with autism imitate spontaneously and other children with autism can learn to imitate, the dynamics of imitation is affected in the large majority of cases. Existing studies from the literature suggest that robots can be used...

Robots are widely collaborating with human users in diferent tasks that require high-level cognitive functions to make them able to discover the surrounding environment. A difcult challenge that we briefy highlight in this short paper is inferring the latent grammatical structure of language, which includes grounding parts of speech (e.g., verbs, n...

Robots are currently having an important growing role in human social life, which requires them to be able to behave appropriately to the context of interaction so as to create a successful long-term human-robot relationship. A major challenge in developing intelligent systems, which could enhance the interactive abilities of robots, is defining cl...

In human–robot interaction scenarios, an intelligent robot should be able to synthesize an appropriate behavior adapted to human profile (i.e., personality). Recent research studies discussed the effect of personality traits on human verbal and nonverbal behaviors. The dynamic characteristics of the generated gestures and postures during the nonver...

An intelligent robot needs to be able to understand human emotions, and to understand and generate actions through cognitive systems that operate in a similar way to human cognition. In this chapter, we mainly focus on developing an online incremental learning system of emotions using Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model. Additionally, we present a gener...

In human-human interaction, the process of communication can be established through three modalities: verbal, non-verbal (i.e., gestures), and/or para-verbal (i.e., prosody). The linguistic literature shows that the para-verbal and non-verbal cues are naturally aligned and synchronized, however the natural mechanism of this synchronization is still...

Robots are more and more present in our daily life; they have to move into human-centered environments, to interact with humans, and to obey some social rules so as to produce an appropriate social behavior in accordance with human's profile (i.e., personality, state of mood, and preferences). Recent researches discussed the effect of personality t...

In human-robot interaction, a social intelligent robot should be capable of understanding the emotional internal state of the interacting human so as to behave in a proper manner. The main problem towards this approach is that human internal states can't be totally trained on, so the robot should be able to learn and classify emotional states onlin...

This paper discusses the importance of modeling personality for social robots. While human-liked features (such as voice, gestures, and postures) are well-studied in social robotics, developing robots with personality traits is still very much in its infancy. In this paper, we show and argue the importance of embodying personality in the robot's be...

This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria (i.e. eye gaze, gaz...

In multimodal human-robot interaction(HRI), the process of communication can be established through verbal, non-verbal, and/or para-verbal cues. The linguistic literature [3] shows that para-verbal and non-verbal communications are naturally synchronized. This research focuses on the relation between non-verbal and para-verbal communication by mapp...

In human-human interaction, para-verbal and non-verbal communication are naturally aligned and synchronized. The difficulty encountered during the coordination between speech and head gestures concerns the conveyed meaning, the way of performing the gesture with respect to speech character-istics, their relative temporal arrangement, and their coor...

A social intelligent robot should be capable of observing and understanding the changes in the environment so as to behave in a proper manner. It also needs to take into account user preferences, user disability level, and user profile. This paper presents a research work based on socially assistive robotics (SAR) technology that aims at providing...

In human-robot interaction, gender and internal state detection play an important role in making the robot reacting in an appropriate manner. This research focuses on the important features to extract from a voice signal in order to construct successful gender and internal state detection systems, and shows the benefits of combining both systems to...

In human-robot interaction, gestures play an im-portant role in transferring messages from the human to the robot and vice versa. The robot has to be able to properly understand the gestures in order to respond in an appropriate manner. This research work focuses on dynamic gestures' recognition using robot's cameras, which capture the performed ge...