Antonio Andriella

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Postdoctoral reseacher at Artificial Intelligence Research Institute

Socially assistive robots represent a promising tool in assistive contexts for improving people’s quality of life and well-being through social, emotional, cognitive, and physical support. However, the effectiveness of interactions heavily relies on the robots’ ability to adapt to the needs of the assisted individuals and to offer support proactive...

The adaptation to users' preferences and the ability to infer and interpret humans' beliefs and intents, which is known as the Theory of Mind (ToM), are two crucial aspects for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. Despite its importance, very few studies have investigated the impact of adaptive robots with ToM abilities. In this work, we...

We introduce social embeddings as a compact, yet semantics-preserving, mathematical representation of social situations. Social embeddings are constructed by leveraging pre-trained large language models: we automatically generate a textual description of the social environment of a robot, and use pre-trained text embeddings to generate a vector rep...

For social robots to be able to operate in unstructured public spaces, they need to be able to gauge complex factors such as human-robot engagement and inter-person social groups, and be able to decide how and with whom to interact. Additionally, such robots should be able to explain their decisions after the fact, to improve accountability and con...

Socially assistive robots represent a promising tool in assistive contexts to improve people's quality of life and well-being through social and emotional support, just like cognitive or physical. However, the effectiveness of interactions depends significantly on their ability to adapt to the needs of the assisted persons and act proactively in an...

The outbreak of Covid-19 precipitated the use of service robots in customer-facing services as a replacement for employees to avoid human-to-human contact. However, this development has not resolved the debate as to whether robots should be characterized with gender attributes or simply be genderless. This study explores whether endowing a robot wi...

The social ability of humans to provide active feedback during conversations is known as backchannelling. Recent work has recognised the importance of endowing robots with such social behaviour to make interactions more natural. Nonetheless, very little is known about how backchannelling should be designed in order to be detected and whether it can...

The ability to install social intelligence protocols in robots in order for them to exhibit conversational skills has made them ideal tools for delivering services with a high cognitive and low emotional load. Little is known about how this capability influences the customer experience and the intention to continue receiving these services. Experie...

In this article, we aim to evaluate the role of robots’ personality-driven behavioural patterns on users’ intention to use in an entertainment scenario. Toward such a goal, we designed two personalities: one introverted with an empathic and self-comparative interaction style, and the other extroverted with a provocative and other-comparative intera...

In recent years, in response to the effects of Covid-19, there has been an increase in the use of social robots in service organisations, as well as in the number of interactions between consumers and robots. However, it is not clear how consumers are valuing these experiences or what the main drivers that shape them are. Furthermore, it is an open...

The aim of this workshop is to foster the exchange of insights on past and ongoing research towards effective and long-lasting collaborations between humans and robots. This workshop will provide a forum for representatives from academia and industry communities to analyse the different aspects of HRI that impact on its success. We particularly foc...

In recent years, the rapid ageing of the population, a longer life expectancy and elderly people’s desire to live independently are social changes that put pressure on healthcare systems. This context is boosting the demand for companion and entertainment social robots on the market and, consequently, producers and distributors are interested in kn...

The Covid-19 pandemic has stimulated the use of social robots in front-office services. However, some initial applications yielded disappointing results, as managers were unaware of the level of development of the robots’ artificial intelligence systems. This study proposes to adapt the Almere model to estimate the technological acceptance of servi...

Socially assistive robots have the potential to augment and enhance therapist’s effectiveness in repetitive tasks such as cognitive therapies. However, their contribution has generally been limited as domain experts have not been fully involved in the entire pipeline of the design process as well as in the automatisation of the robots’ behaviour. I...

Recent studies have revealed the key importance of modelling personality in robots to improve interaction quality by empowering them with social-intelligence capabilities. Most research relies on verbal and non-verbal features related to personality traits that are highly context-dependent. Hence, analysing how humans behave in a given context is c...

The aim of this workshop is to give researchers from academia and industry the possibility to discuss the inter-and multi-disciplinary nature of the relationships between people and robots towards effective and long-lasting collaborations. This workshop will provide a forum for the HRI and robotics communities to explore successful human-robot inte...

Robots are expected to become part of everyday life. However, while there have been important breakthroughs during the recent decades in terms of technological advances, the ability of robots to interact with humans intuitively and effectively is still an open challenge. In this paper, we aim to evaluate how humans interpret and leverage backchanne...

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in deploying robotic systems in public environments able to effectively interact with people. To properly work in the wild, such systems should be robust and be able to deal with complex and unpredictable events that seldom happen in controlled laboratory conditions. Moreover, having to deal wit...

Every 3 seconds, someone develops dementia worldwide. Brain-training exercises, preferably involving also physical activity, have shown their potential to monitor and improve the brain function of people affected by Alzheimer disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This paper presents a cognitive robotic system designed to assist mild deme...

Social Assistive Robots are a powerful tool to be used in patients’ cognitive training. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a new methodology to enable caregivers to teach cognitive exercises to the robot in an easy and natural way. We build upon our existing framework, in which a robot is employed to provide encouragement and hints while a pa...

Collecting data in Human-Robot Interaction for training learning agents might be a hard task to accomplish. This is especially true when the target users are older adults with dementia since this usually requires hours of interactions and puts quite a lot of workload on the user. This paper addresses the problem of importing the Personas technique...

Social Assistive Robots are a powerful tool to be used in patients' cognitive training. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a new methodology to enable caregivers to teach cognitive exercises to the robot in an easy and natural way. We build upon our existing framework, in which a robot is employed to provide encouragement and hints while a pa...

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) represent a major challenge for health systems within the aging population. New and better instruments will be crucial to assess the disease severity and progression, as well as to improve its treatment, stimulation, and rehabilitation. With the purpose of detecting, assessing and quantif...