
Anara SandygulovaNazarbayev University | NU · Department of Robotics
Anara Sandygulova
PhD in Computer Science
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (99)
Sign languages are considered fully-fledged and complete natural languages that are utilized by individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing as a means of communication within the visual-gestural modality. The utilization of virtual avatars as virtual assistants has witnessed a notable surge over the course of the previous fifteen years. Research on...
Sign Languages (SL) are natural languages used by those who are deaf or have hearing impairments, as well as by hearing persons, including interpreters, family members, and friends of deaf individuals. Spoken languages rely primarily on verbal and written communication, whereas sign language focuses mainly on visual-gestural communication. In their...
The current body of scholarly literature highlights the increasing importance of Mixed Reality (MR) in the field of education since it provides an alternative way through visual stimuli inside an immersive environment. In recent years, the possibility for educators to use Mixed Reality as an additional pedagogical instrument has witnessed notable g...
The aim of this paper is to provide a survey on the perception of robot intelligence. After a general overview, the paper specifically focuses on how perceived intelligence varies either between before and after the experiment (“pre-test–post-test variation“), and in subsequent sessions due to habituation. After reviewing the main characteristics o...
Robot-assisted language learning produces comparable results to human tutors in a long-term study with elementary school children.
The development of data-driven behaviour generating systems has recently become the focus of considerable attention in the fields of human-agent interaction (HAI) and human-robot interaction (HRI). Although rule-based approaches were dominant for years, these proved inflexible and expensive to develop. The difficulty of developing production rules,...
Education is one of the predominant applications that is foreseen by researchers in social robotics. In this context, social robots are often designed to interact with one or several learners and with teachers. While educational scenarios for social robots have been studied widely, with experiments being conducted in several countries for nearly 20...
Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) is a learning paradigm characteristic of collaborative interaction between learners with alternating tutor- tutee roles. In recent years, robot-assisted language learning (RALL) has gained traction by its wide application for learning language skills, such as speaking or writing, using social robots. Our work aims at...
The Montessori method is well-known for its child-centered and hands-on learning approach for early literacy development. This study is the first to apply the Montessori method in robot-assisted language learning (RALL). We developed an alphabet learning system that consists of a Moveable alphabet, a tablet, and a social robot. We conducted a betwe...
Robot-assisted language learning (RALL) is an emerging field of human-robot interaction to support language acquisition and literacy development with a social robot in multi-modal ways. As learning is an inherently social activity, the effectiveness of dyadic and triadic types of social interaction in RALL and child-robot interaction (CRI) needs to...
This study investigates how different motion planning algorithms, implemented on a collaborative robot (cobot), are perceived by 48 human subjects. The four implemented algorithms ensure human safety based on the concept of speed and separation monitoring , but differ based on the following characteristics: (a) the cobot motion happens either along...
We present the interdisciplinary CoWriting Kazakh project in which a social robot acts as a peer in learning the new Kazakh Latin alphabet, to which Kazakhstan is going to shift from the current Kazakh Cyrillic by 2030. We discuss the past literature on cognitive learning and script acquisition in-depth and present a theoretical framing for this st...
The COVID-19-related lockdown interrupted children’s learning progress and discontinued social learning and regular activities that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) rely on socially and physically. Negative consequences for children with ASD were reported far and wide. To investigate this problem in Kazakhstan, we conducted a mixed-meth...
With its focus on robot-assisted autism therapy, this paper presents case-by-case analyses of socio-emotional outcomes of 34 children aged 3–12 years old, with different cases of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). We grouped children by the following characteristics: ASD alone (n = 22), ASD+ADHD (n =...
This review paper focuses on different aspects of perceived safety for a number of autonomous physical systems. This is a major aspect of robotics research, as more and more applications allow humans and autonomous systems to share their space, with crucial implications both on safety and on its perception. The alternative terms used to express rel...
Parental involvement in traditional autism therapy is key to the effective treatment of children with ASD. Little is known about parental involvement in robot-assisted autism therapy (RAAT)—novel therapeutic support for children with ASD. Our study investigates the effect of parental presence on multiple-session RAAT conducted with 16 children with...
The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) research is multidisciplinary and requires researchers to understand diverse fields including computer science, engineering, informatics, philosophy, psychology, and more disciplines. However, it is hard to be an expert in everything. To help HRI researchers develop methodological skills, especially in are...
The evolving field of human-robot interaction (HRI) necessitates that we better understand how social robots operate and interact with humans. This scoping review provides an overview of about 300 research works focusing on the use of the NAO robot from 2010 to 2020. This study presents one of the most extensive and inclusive pieces of evidence on...
3D avatars are widely used in various fields of emerging technology, from augmented reality to social robots. To interact in a natural way with the user, they must be able to show at least some basic emotions. However, generating animation for these virtual avatars is a time-consuming task and a creative process. The main goal of this work is to fa...
While there is a known issue of progression of women enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields in Western nations, the same topic has been under-examined in other contexts. Focusing on Central Asia specifically Post-Soviet Kazakhstan, this chapter presents insights on the topic of gender equity in STEM in Kazakhstan. As s...
Social robots are increasingly being used as a mediator between a therapist and a child in autism therapy studies. In this context, most behavioural interventions are typically short-term in nature. This paper describes a long-term study that was conducted with 11 children diagnosed with either Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or ASD in co-occurrence...
This review paper focuses on different aspects of perceived safety for a number of autonomous physical systems. This is a major aspect of robotics research, as more and more applications allow human and autonomous systems to share their space, with crucial implications both on safety and on its perception. The alternative terms used to express rela...
Social robots deployed in the therapy of autism is a promising and important research domain. Recently, an increasing amount of work is being conducted utilizing a social robot as a mediator between a therapist and a child with autism. Being able to evaluate how engaged a child is both offline and in real-time would improve the quality of the provi...
This paper showcases the work that aims at building a user-friendly mobile application of a reverse dictionary to translate sign languages to spoken languages. The concept behind the reverse dictionary is the ability to perform a video-based search by demonstrating a handshape in front of a mobile phone’s camera. The user would be able to use this...
Do handwriting skills transfer when a child writes in two different scripts, such as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets? Are our measures of handwriting skills intrinsically bound to one alphabet or will a child who faces handwriting difficulties in one script experience similar difficulties in the other script? To answer these questions, 190 childre...
This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical objectives about language learning. Teachers are not necessarily trained to teach the new alp...
This research is situated in a specialized context offering a rarely occurring opportunity for research questions and technical objectives about language acquisition. The Kazakh language transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in Kazakhstan raises challenges to teach the whole population to write and read in the new script. We propose an unique...
Facial expressions in sign languages are used to express grammatical functions, such as question marking, but can also be used to express emotions (either the signer’s own or in constructed action contexts). Emotions and grammatical functions can utilize the same articulators, and the combinations can be congruent or incongruent. For instance, surp...
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This paper presents an exploratory study consisting of a series of Robot-Mediated Therapy (RMT) sessions utilizing a humanoid NAO robot with five children with a severe form of autism for two weeks. The focus on RMT for children with low-functioning autism (LFA) was motivated by a relative neglect of Robot-Assisted Therapy efforts to address additi...
This paper presents a patient-centered interaction design of Robot-Assisted Therapy or Robot-Assisted Play (RAP) applications for children with a diverse form of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) combined with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Through our iterative evaluation process based on observations of fourteen children over sever...
Social environments are often complex and ambiguous: Many queries to the robot are collaborative and do not have an assigned addressee, for example, a family. In contrast, in the case of conflicting queries, social robots need to participate in value decisions and negotiate multi-party interactions. With the aim of investigating who robots should a...
This paper presents an observational study conducted on the premises of the Children's Rehabilitation Center with the aim to investigate the impact of the Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) on nonverbal children with severe form of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Through our iterative evaluation process...
Social robots are increasingly being used to encourage social, emotional and cognitive growth in children. However, in order to establish social and bonding interactions, social robots need to be able to exhibit adaptive strategies to keep children engaged and interested. Adaptive strategies of a social robot based on children’s age and gender are...
Despite the increase of research and applications for child-robot interactions, little is known about children»s responses to a robot»s gender across age and gender groups. This paper presents an exploratory study intended to examine whether the perceived robot»s gender affects the interaction between a child and a robot. This paper details the pre...
One of the fundamental aspects of social interaction is persuasion. It is a useful feature for a social robot to incorporate in its social behavior. Persuasiveness in human-robot interaction can be influenced by a number of factors including robot»s appearance and behavior. In this study, the effect of robot gender was investigated. The experiment...
In order to establish social and bonding relationships with children, robots need to be able to adapt to a variety of users of different age and gender groups in order to keep them engaged and motivated. To this end, this research examines the responses of 107 children, ages 5 to 12, who interacted with humanoid robot NAO that communicated with syn...
Hearing-impaired communities around the world communicate via a sign language. The focus of this work is to develop an interpreting human-robot interaction system that could act as a sign language interpreter in public places. To this end, we utilize a number of technologies including depth cameras (a leap motion sensor and Microsoft Kinect), human...
This paper presents an exploratory research on the proxemics behavior occurring during child-robot interaction. Due to the increase in usage of NAO robots in child environments and applications, it is increasingly important to design an appropriate model for proximate interaction for children of different age groups. For this purpose we conducted a...
This paper presents a preliminary study exploring playing strategy of a robot and the way it can affect a learning outcome of young adults. We developed a social robot that plays the role of a learning companion for a foreign language. We conducted a preliminary study where we explored two robot playing strategies, always-winning and always-losing,...
Hearing-impaired communities around the world communicate via a sign language. The focus of this work is to develop an interpreting human-robot interaction system that could act as a sign language interpreter in public places. This paper presents an ongoing work, which aims to recognize fingerspelling gestures in real time. To this end, we utilize...
In order to inform the important considerations when designing robotic applications for public spaces, the focus of this research is to investigate what socio-psychological effects should influence robot’s decision-making within public environments. Social environments are often complex and ambiguous: many queries to the robot are collaborative (e....
The goal of this ongoing research is to examine the feasibility of using a social humanoid robot to teach children the basics of programming. We focus on exploring robot’s adaptive strategies in order to facilitate both effective educational applications and engaging child-robot interaction. In this paper we present our preliminary work, which expl...
Ubiquitous robots are robots integrated with smart environments, where they cooperate with networks of heterogeneous sensors to achieve complex tasks. Their successful application opens important research questions for both their engineering and their interaction with human users, especially in public space scenarios, when they need to interact in...
This paper presents a study of children’s responses to the perceived gender and age of a humanoid robot Nao that communicated with four genuine synthesized child voices. This research investigates children’s preferences for an English accent. Results indicate that manipulations of robot’s age and gender are successful for all voice conditions, howe...
This paper presents a study of children’s responses to the perceived gender and age of a humanoid robot Nao that communicated with four genuine synthesized child voices. Results indicate that manipulations are successful for all voice conditions, thus some voices are preferred by children for Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI).
In order to inform the important consideration when de- signing robotic applications for children, in this paper we describe and report the results of the preliminary study we conducted in a primary school. Our work investigates the impact of gender development by examining children’s per- ceptions of robot’s gender on levels of expressed happiness...