Birgit Lugrin

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Department of Computer Science

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has proven its usefulness in various fields, such as robotic control systems, recommendation algorithms, and natural language dialogue interfaces. Recently, we have been witnessing a growing interest in applying DRL in education, with early results suggesting beneficial effects. However, the majority of research in...

Background Children with low reading skills are less frequently engaged in reading activities and therefore the likelihood of improving their reading skills decreases. Digital game‐based interventions have emerged as a promising tool for promoting reading development in children, particularly those with reading difficulties. As syllable‐based readi...

Storytelling is a long-established tradition and listening to stories is still a popular leisure activity. Caused by technization, storytelling media expands, e.g., to social robots acting as multi-modal storytellers, using different multimodal behaviours such as facial expressions or body postures. With the overarching goal to automate robotic sto...

Reading words accurately and fast is an important step in the process of learning to read that is not mastered by all children. They are stuck in letter-by-letter, slow and error-prone reading. Because of stable reading development trajectories, early interventions are needed. To address the heterogeneous reading difficulties, individualized suppor...

This paper presents a system consisting of two tools to facilitate the cost-effective implementation of mixed-cultural intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for both basic and applied research. The first tool automatically introduces grammatical mistakes and non-native accents into a given text to produce synthetic non-native speech. The second tool is...

Learning to read can be difficult, but is a crucial skill that is needed for the whole lifespan. Deficiencies in reading capabilities can often be traced back to the initial attempts to learn reading during primary school. While there exist a number of analogue and digital tools to support reading acquisition for primary school children, they often...

This paper presents an interaction study that investigates whether participants adapt their verbal and non-verbal behaviour towards an IVA that shows non-native speech patterns in a way that is congruent to observations previously made in human-human and human-agent interaction. In a between-subjects design, participants either interacted with an I...

Chatbots are widely used in different areas, ranging from healthcare applications, social support, task assistance to customer service. Within this study, we investigated two different chatbot personalities in the field of information management (IM). In IM the motives for using a chatbot are mostly aimed at efficiency and productivity and less at...

Racial bias, implicit or explicit, is still a widespread phenomenon in our modern society, negatively affecting the way we interact with foreigners. These biases can also lead to the general tendency to avoid encounters with foreigners, which has a critical impact on society as a whole. This paper presents an approach to reduce implicit and explici...

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...

The integration of robots as storytellers, game masters or embodied characters into games is a novel technique for game design yet restricted to human-robot interaction (HRI) research. To facilitate the usage of robots, a plugin for a common game engine is needed. NarRobot was developed to provide an easy to use interface and seamless integration o...

This field study investigates the influence of social robots as a hotel assessment tool on hotel ratings. Based on media equation theory, it is assumed that social robots increase quality and quantity of hotel ratings by triggering politeness rules. We developed a robot application that allowed hotel guests to submit ratings on site together with t...

From teaching technical skills to telling bedtime stories, social robots support various edutainment tasks that require smooth communication. Previous studies often emphasized the importance of the autonomy of social robots for those tasks. However, the cabling of robots with power sources and/ or host computers is often required due to technical r...

This paper presents an exploratory study which investigates the impact of different non-native accents and the naturalness of speech on the correct assignment of an Intelligent Virtual Agent's (IVA) mother tongue, as well as its perceived warmth, competence and intelligibility. An online-experiment with a between subjects design was conducted, in w...

Despite the fact that mixed-cultural backgrounds become of increasing importance in our daily life, the representation of multiple cultural backgrounds in one entity is still rare in socially interactive agents (SIAs). This paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it provides a survey of research on mixed-cultured SIAs. Second, it presents a study i...

Virtual environments and games are often used to evoke positive emotions. Contrary the survival horror genre aims to induce negative feelings in players. The effects of playing fear-inducing games in virtual reality (VR) is rather unexplored, since research mainly focuses on positive emotions. To investigate the relationship between immersion, pres...

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or othe...

This chapter contains a collection of interviews on current challenges and future directions that researchers are faced with when working with Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs).

Separating and recycling waste is an important topic to protect our environment and achieve a more sustainable future. However, recycling also is a complex process, as each type of waste needs a specific recycling method. This comes along with multiple recycling containers, each relevant for one specific type of waste. Ensuring a correct recycling...

Virtual environments (VEs) can evoke and support emotions, as experienced when playing emotionally arousing games. We theoretically approach the design of fear and joy evoking VEs based on a literature review of empirical studies on virtual and real environments as well as video games’ reviews and content analyses. We define the design space and id...

Self-directed learning is a critical requirement in adult education, which stresses the importance of appropriate learning environments, to support this process. Moreover, motivation of learners is critical for the acquisition of knowledge in a self-directed manner. Gamification, theoretically framed by self-determination theory, provides a framewo...

Learning is a central component of human life and essential for personal development. Therefore, utilizing new technologies in the learning context and exploring their combined potential are considered essential to support self-directed learning in a digital age. A learning environment can be expanded by various technical and content-related aspect...

The Covid19 pandemic situation stressed the importance of appropriate digital applications that foster knowledge acquisition and can be used independently. This requires empirically validated applications, adapted to and evaluated within their target group. We therefore developed a theory based mobile app for training reading skills including two g...

Learning in higher education scenarios requires self-directed learning and the challenging task of self-motivation while individual support is rare. The integration of social robots to support learners has already shown promise to benefit the learning process in this area. In this paper, we focus on the applicability of an adaptive robotic tutor in...

Reading is an essential ability and a cornerstone of education. However, learning to read can be challenging for children. To scaffold young learners, a number of reading interventions were developed, including a syllable-based approach in German, which has proven to be successful, but resource and time consuming through individual interaction by e...

Several times a day, we touch our faces and all kinds of surfaces, and often we are not even aware that pathogens are transported via surfaces and our hands. There are already a large number of educational or governmental videos that aim to raise people’s awareness towards health and hygienic behavior, but whether videos simulating the spread of pa...

Contemporary societies are comprised of individuals very diverse in terms of culture, status, gender and age. In this context, there is no single system behaviour that fits all users, not even considering the traditional “personalization” efforts of adaptable systems, in which individual users can explicitly tailor some system features to their nee...

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or othe...

Learning in university setting includes the challenging task of self-motivation of the learner. The use of social robots has been shown to support the learner in their social learning process. In this paper, we address the motivation of learners in terms of self-determination theory as a theoretical framework to address need satisfaction. To this e...

Self-directed learning is of critical importance in adult learning, for example, when taking part in online courses or learning at universities. To work on a challenging topic continuously requires learners to self-motivate. By applying self-determination theory to address the basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness, the...

Storytelling bears great potential as prospective application for social robots. Through their embodiment and potential for multi-modal behavior, they can enhance current storytelling media, for example books or audio books. We combined theoretical knowledge about designing storytelling robots with an analysis of human storytellers to implement the...

Humanoid robots (i.e., robots with a human-like body) are projected to be mass marketed in the future in several fields of application. Today, however, user evaluations of humanoid robots are often based on mediated depictions rather than actual observations or interactions with a robot, which holds true not least for scientific user studies. Peopl...

The users' positive or negative attitude towards robots is a crucial factor in human-robot interaction (HRI). We conducted a preliminary online study comparing a storytelling scenario including personal respectively impersonal framing to investigate effects of the robot's self-introduction on the users' attitude towards and likeability of the robot...

Having a mixed-cultural membership becomes increasingly common in our modern society. It is thus beneficial in several ways to create Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) that reflect a mixed-cultural background as well, e.g., for educational settings. For research with such IVAs, it is essential that they are classified as non-native by members of a...

Enhancing learning scenarios with social robots, as well as gamification elements, has been shown to positively influence motivation, engagement, or even both. However, they have not been combined in a learning environment. For this contribution, we created a learning environment for students in higher education and implemented additions (social ro...

We connected theory and research on narrative persuasion to the literature on social robots and examined the effects of a robotic storyteller’s facial expressions. The congruency between the emotional arc of a story and the facial expressions of the robot was of particular interest. In a lab experiment, participants were confronted with a storytell...

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2021, held as a virtual event, in April 2021. The 17 full papers presented in this book together with 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sect...

The benefits of social robots in educational contexts were mainly investigated with children, but also bear great potential to support learners and teachers in higher education. To further explore the potential of social robots in the context of university teaching, we implemented a robot-supported learning environment as a complementary training t...

Smart home systems increasingly find their way into private households and efforts are being made to integrate lifelike user interfaces (e.g. social robots) to facilitate the interaction with the smart environment. Considering this, the question arises which benefits such embodied user interfaces offer compared to conventional devices. We are prese...

Social robots are envisioned to support elderly people in their daily lives. To interact in a socially competent way with its users a Robotic Elderly Assistant (REA), just as any other social robot, should consider the full social context of the situation in which it is interacting. In this paper, we investigate how to identify important factors th...

Ambient systems and agents in human-agent shared environments require a great amount of contextual knowledge to successfully handle dynamic situations. The generation, integration , and processing of various forms of knowledge, such as semantic and spatial representations, pose a challenge in intelligent systems. To address this, we integrate real...

This paper presents an experiment evaluating the effects of virtual agents' language proficiency on whether they are perceived as a native speakers or not. Our first results indicate that beyond 10% word order mistakes and 25% infinitive mistakes, virtual agents are perceived as non-native speakers, even though their appearance and non-verbal behav...

Recent advances in VR technology allow users to consume immersive content within their own living room. Substitutional Reality (SR) promises to enhance this experience by integrating the physical environment into the simulation. We propose a novel approach, called Smart Substitutional Reality (SSR), that extends the passive haptics of SR with the i...

In this paper, we propose the integration of audience atmosphere generation techniques into Interactive Storytelling (IS) engines to obtain more realistic and variable Virtual Reality (VR) training systems.We outline a number of advantages of this novel combination compared to current atmosphere generation techniques. The features of recent IS engi...

In naher Zukunft werden Roboter immer häufiger in den Lebensbereichen von Alltagsnutzerinnen und -nutzern anzutreffen sein. Sehr deutlich wird dies am Beispiel von Haushalts- und Pflegerobotern, denen im Hinblick auf eine alternde Gesellschaft verstärkt die Rolle des Mitbewohners und Weggefährten zukommen wird. Damit einher geht der Wunsch, die Men...

People tend to adapt to their conversation partners. In mixed-cultural settings, with a native and a non-native speaker, adaptation can manifest itself in the usage of simplified language or increased usage of nonverbal scaffolding to foster understanding. In this contribution, we address the question whether the phenomenon of AFC (adapted, foreign...

Given that human speakers adapt their communicative behavior towards non-native listeners -- a phenomenon known as foreigner talk or teacher talk -- the communicative behavior of an interactive, intelligent virtual agent (IIVA) should also to be adaptive towards the needs of non-native listeners. To investigate the question whether it makes sense t...