Christopher Edward Peters

KTH Royal Institute of Technology | KTH · Division of Computational Science and Technology (CST)

Existing methods for synthesizing 3D human gestures from speech have shown promising results, but they do not explicitly model the impact of emotions on the generated gestures. Instead, these methods directly output animations from speech without control over the expressed emotion. To address this limitation, we present AMUSE, an emotional speech-d...

Politeness and embodiment are pivotal elements in human-agent interactions. While many previous works advocate the positive role of embodiment in enhancing these interactions, it remains unclear how embodiment and politeness affect individuals joining groups. In this paper, we explore how politeness behaviors (verbal and nonverbal) exhibited by thr...

Politeness is critical for shaping human-human interactions and therefore seems an important consideration in human interactions with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). However, the impact of artificially-generated politeness behaviors on humans in Virtual Environments (VE) is not clear. We explore the impact of immersiveness on the perceived p...

Politeness is at the core of the common set of behavioral norms that regulate human communication and is therefore of significant interest in the design of Human-Robot Interactions. In this paper, we investigate how the politeness behaviors of a humanoid robot impact human decisions about where to join a group of two robots. We also evaluate the re...

Politeness is at the core of the common set of behavioral norms that regulate human communication and is therefore of significant interest in the design of Human-Robot Interactions. In this paper, we investigate how the politeness behaviors of a humanoid robot impact human decisions about where to join a group of two robots. We also evaluate the re...

Multimodal communication is essential in human interactions, as it allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced exchange of information and emotions. The use of multiple communication channels such as speech, body language, and gaze can enhance the clarity and richness of the communication, leading to better understanding and more effective social i...

When modeling lifelike Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), conveying politeness through verbal and nonverbal behaviors with persuasive intents is a significant challenge, as it underlies the conventional set of behavioral rules that govern human communication. In the present study, we explore the adherence to such rules in the context of joining...

Urban spaces are defined by degrees of axial and convex extension. Space Syntax research has predominantly emphasized axial lines and maps and considered convexity through isovists and visibility graphs. Axiality emphasizes movement or flow and creates axi al maps as two-dimensional networks. Convexity of urban space is aural and shaped by vision a...

While creativity has been previously studied in Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI), the effect of regulatory focus on creativity skills has not been investigated. This paper presents an exploratory study that, for the first time, uses the Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) to assess children's creativity skills in an educational context with a social robot....

Computer-Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) finds its historical precedents in technological enthusiasm for generative algorithms and architectural intelligence. Current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and paradigms in Machine Learning (ML) bring new opportunities for creating innovative digital architectural tools, but in practice this...

In this paper, we present a study aimed at understanding whether the embodiment and humanlikeness of an artificial agent can affect people’s spontaneous and instructed mimicry of its facial expressions. The study followed a mixed experimental design and revolved around an emotion recognition task. Participants were randomly assigned to one level of...

When we practice a movement, human brains creates a motor memory of it. These memories are formed and stored in the brain as representations which allows us to perform familiar tasks faster than new movements. From a developmental robotics and embodied artificial agent perspective it could be also beneficial to exploit the concept of these motor re...

In educational scenarios involving social robots, understanding the way robot behaviors affect children’s motivation to achieve their learning goals is of vital importance. It is crucial for the formation of a trust relationship between the child and the robot so that the robot can effectively fulfill its role as a learning companion. In this study...

Digital ubiquity brings revelations of emerging smart cities. However, planners and urban designers remain resistant to digitalization trends and remain devoted to traditional sketching and hand drawing. A major problem in digitizing planning and urban design practices is the misfit with current software. Urban designers need to deliver engaging il...

The new developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) bring revelations of emerging smart cities. However, AI has not yet been integrated in Computer Aided Design (CAD), Building Information Modelling (BIM) or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. There are experiments with AI in urban mo...

According to psychology research, emotional induction has positive implications in many domains such as therapy and education. Our aim in this paper was to manipulate the Regulatory Focus Theory to assess its impact on the induction of regulatory focus related emotions in children in a pretend play scenario with a social robot. The Regulatory Focus...

In this paper, we present a study aimed at understanding whether the embodiment and humanlikeness of an artificial agent can affect people's spontaneous and instructed mimicry of its facial expressions. The study followed a mixed experimental design and revolved around an emotion recognition task. Participants were randomly assigned to one level of...

The analysis and simulation of the interactions that occur in group situations is important when humans and artificial agents, physical or virtual, must coordinate when inhabiting similar spaces or even collaborate, as in the case of human-robot teams. Artificial systems should adapt to the natural interfaces of humans rather than the other way aro...

New developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital ubiquity bring revelations of emerging smart cities. However, urban designers are particularly reluctant to become digital and use software that automatically generates cities. Instead, they return to traditional design skills such as creating scale models, sketching, notations and drafti...

Politeness behaviors could affect individuals' decisions heavily in their daily lives and may therefore also play an important role in human-agent interactions. This study considers the impact of politeness behaviors made by a virtual agent, already in a small face-to-face conversational group with another agent, on a human participant as they appr...

Mobile robots that approach free-standing conversational groups to join them should behave in a safe and socially-acceptable way. Existing trajectory generation methods focus on collision avoidance with pedestrians, and the models that generate approach behaviors into groups are evaluated in simulation. However, it is challenging to generate approa...

Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human-computer interaction, not only for informing the design and implementation of interfaces, but also for enabling more sophisticated interfaces capable of adapting to users. While the notion of engagement is actively being studied in a diverse set of domains, the term has been used to refer to...

Social robots can be used to motivate children to engage in learning activities in education. In such contexts, they might need to persuade children to achieve specific learning goals. We conducted an exploratory study with 42 children in a museum setting. Children were asked to play an interactive storytelling game on a touchscreen. A Furhat robot...

When a conversational group is approached by a newcomer who wishes to join it, the group may dynamically react by adjusting their positions and orientations in order to accommodate it. These reactions represent important cues to the newcomer about if and how they should plan their approach. The recognition and analysis of such socially complaint dy...

Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human-computer interaction, not only for informing the design and implementation of interfaces, but also for enabling more sophisticated interfaces capable of adapting to users. While the notion of engagement is actively being studied in a diverse set of domains, the term has been used to refer to...

Goal directed agent navigation in crowd simulations involves a complex decision making process. An agent must avoid all collisions with static or dynamic obstacles (such as other agents) and keep a trajectory faithful to its target at the same time. This seemingly global optimization problem can be broken down into smaller local optimization proble...

While many works involving human-agent interactions have focused on individuals or crowds, modelling interactions on the group scale has not been considered in depth. Simulation of interactions with groups of agents is vital in many applications, enabling more comprehensive and realistic behavior encompassing all possibilities between crowd and ind...

In order to design social agents for long term interactions, it is important to enable them to adapt to the users. In this paper, we chose personality as a medium for adaptation. We conducted a study with 20 participants who watched a story presented by a virtual character in one of two conditions: extroverted or introverted. The study aimed at ass...

Mixed reality, which seeks to better merge virtual objects and their interactions with the real environment, offers numerous potentials for the improved design of robots and our interactions with them. In this paper, we present our ongoing work towards the development of a mixed reality platform for designing social interactions with robots through...

Serious games with virtual characters heavily depend on character properties related to social interactions and awareness. This paper presents social-aware navigation for crowds in serious games. It enables a virtual character to join a group or navigate to a goal position through a crowd with static and dynamic group formations in a safe and socia...

Serious games with virtual characters heavily depend on character properties related to social interactions and awareness. This paper presents social-aware navigation for crowds in serious games. It enables a virtual character to join a group or navigate to a goal position through a crowd with static and dynamic group formations in a safe and socia...

Robots that navigate to approach free-standing conversational groups should do so in a safe and socially acceptable manner. This is challenging since it not only requires the robot to plot trajectories that avoid collisions with members of the group, but also to do so without making those in the group feel uncomfortable, for example, by moving too...

While many works involving human-agent interactions have fo-cused on individuals or crowds, modelling interactions on the group scale has not been considered in depth. Simulation of interactions with groups of agents is vital in many applications, enabling more comprehensive and realistic behavior encompassing all possibilities between crowd and in...

Verbal and non-verbal behaviors that we use in order to effectively communicate with other people are vital for our success in our daily lives. Despite the importance of social skills, creating standardized methods for training them and supporting their training is challenging. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) may have a good potenti...

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been widely applied in robotics to study tasks such as locomotion and grasping, but its application to social human-robot interaction (HRI) remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a deep learning scheme that acquires a prior model of robot approaching behavior in simulation and applies it to real-worl...

Mixed reality offers new potentials for social interaction experiences with virtual agents. In addition, it can be used to experiment with the design of physical robots. However, while previous studies have investigated comfortable social distances between humans and artificial agents in real and virtual environments, there is little data with rega...

Modelling and simulation of pedestrian crowds require agents to reach pre-determined goals and avoid collisions with static obstacles and dynamic pedestrians, while maintaining natural gait behaviour. We model pedestrians as autonomous, learning, and reactive agents employing Reinforcement Learning (RL). Typical RL-based agent simulations suffer po...

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is a challenging problem. One of the aspects that makes it so challenging is the fact that the future positions of an agent are not only determined by its previous positions, but also by the interaction of the agent with its neighbors. Previous methods, like Social Attention have considered the interactions with all...

Agent-based crowd simulation in virtual environments is of great utility in a variety of domains, from the entertainment industry to serious applications including mobile robots and swarms. Many studies of crowd behavior simulations do not consider the fact that people tend to congregate in smaller social gatherings, such as friends, or families, r...

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been widely applied in robotics to study tasks such as locomotion and grasping, but its application to social human-robot interaction (HRI) remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a deep learning scheme that acquires a prior model of robot approaching behavior in simulation and applies it to real-worl...

Virtual characters play a central role in populating virtual worlds, whether they act as conduits for human expressions as avatars or are automatically controlled by a machine as agents. In modern game-related scenarios, it is economical to assemble virtual characters from varying sources of appearances and motions. However, doing so may have unint...

In this demo, we will showcase a platform we are currently developing for experimenting with situated interaction using mixed reality. The user will wear a Microsoft HoloLens and be able to interact with a virtual character presenting a poster. We argue that a poster presentation scenario is a good test bed for studying phenomena such as multi-part...

This work explores the relationship between a robot's embodiment and people's ability to mimic its behavior. It presents a study in which participants were asked to mimic a 3D mixed-embodied robotic head and a 2D version of the same character. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were performed from questionnaires. Quantitative results show no sig...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2017, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2017. The 30 regular papers and 31 demo papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The annual IVA conference represents the main interdisciplinary sci...

Most research on the uncanny valley effect is concerned with the influence of human-likeness and realism as a trigger of an uncanny feeling in humans. There has been a lack of investigation on the effect of other dimensions, for example, gender. Back-projected robotic heads allow us to alter visual cues in the appearance of the robot in order to in...

This paper investigates the influence of multimodal incongruent gender cues on the perception of a robot's uncanniness and gender in children. The back-projected robot head Furhat was equipped with a female and male face texture and voice synthesizer and the voice and facial cues were tested in congruent and incongruent combinations. 106 children b...

Technology is the future , woven into every aspect of our lives, but how are we to interact with all this technology and what happens when problems arise? Artificial agents, such as virtual characters and social robots could offer a realistic solution to help facilitate interactions between humans and machines—if only these agents were better equip...

A person's emotions and state of mind are apparent in their face and eyes. As a Latin proverb states: ‘The face is the portrait of the mind; the eyes, its informers’. This presents a significant challenge for Computer Graphics researchers who generate artificial entities that aim to replicate the movement and appearance of the human eye, which is s...