Sascha Sebastian Griffiths

Bielefeld University · CITEC - Cognitive Interaction Technology

In this contribution, we look at technology transfer in robotics. Generally, there is a delay between a science-push and a market-pull. In order of finding means to decrease this lag, we are going to look at the causes of this effect and at the means for improving technology transfer. For this purpose, we use a variety of data sources which shed lig...

The present contribution investigates the construction of dialogue structure for the use in human-machine interaction especially for robotic systems and embodied conversational agents. We are going to present a methodology and findings of a pilot study for the design of task-specific dialogues. Specifically, we investigated effects of dialogue comp...

Many applications in the fields of Service Robotics and Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration, require interaction with a human in a potentially unstructured environment. In many cases, a natural language interface can be helpful, but it requires powerful means of knowledge representation and processing, e.g., using ontologies and reasoning. In this...

This article explores the rapidly advancing innovation to endow robots with social intelligence capabilities in the form of multilingual and multimodal emotion recognition, and emotion-aware decision-making capabilities, for contextually appropriate robot behaviours and cooperative social human–robot interaction for the healthcare domain. The objec...

As a contribution to the more general discussion on causes of language endangerment and death, we describe the language ecologies of four related languages (Bà Mambila [mzk]/[mcu], Sombә (Somyev or Kila) [kgt], Oumyari Wawa [www], Njanga (Kwanja) [knp]) of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland to reach an understanding of the factors and circumstances th...

In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are used as motivational aids. These are two "paradigms", so to speak, within the small but growing area of robots...

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the role of social agents as language teachers. Our experiment was designed to investigate whether a physical agent in form of a social robot provides a better language-learning experience than a virtual agent. We evaluated the interactions regarding enjoyment, immersion, and vocabulary reten...

In this paper, we present an autonomous AI system designed for a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) study, set around a dice game scenario. We conduct a case study to answer our research question: Does a robot with a socially engaged personality lead to a higher acceptance than a competitive personality? The flexibility of our proposed system allows us...

We present an illustrative example of an interactive auditory perception approach performed by a humanoid robot called NICO, the Neuro Inspired COmpanion [1]. The video demonstrates a material classification task in the style of a classic TV game show. NICO and another candidate are sup-posed to determine the content of small plastic capsules that...

In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are used as motivational aids. These are two "paradigms", so to speak, within the small but growing area of robots...

Exercising is strongly recommended for prevention and treatment of pathologies with high prevalence such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and diabetes. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that insufficient physical activity is one of the leading risk factors for death worldwide. The decrease of physical activity in our society is not just...

We present a proof of concept to show how a deep network for end-to-end visuomotor learning to grasp is coupled with an attention focus mechanism for state-of-the-art object detection with convolutional neural networks. The cognitively motivated integration of both methods in a single robotic system allows us to realize a high-level interface to us...

Lake et al. point out that grounding learning in general principles of embodied perception and social cognition is the next step in advancing artificial intelligent machines. We suggest it is necessary to go further and consider lifelong learning, which includes developmental learning, focused on embodiment as applied in developmental robotics and...

Advancements in Human-Robot Interaction involve robots being more responsive and adaptive to the human user they are interacting with. For example, robots model a personalised dialogue with humans, adapting the conversation to accommodate the user's preferences in order to allow natural interactions. This study investigates the impact of such perso...

This paper describes the techniques used in the submitted video presenting an interaction scenario, realised using the Neuro-Inspired Companion (NICO) robot. NICO engages the users in a personalised conversation where the robot always tracks the users' face, remembers them and interacts with them using natural language. NICO can also learn to perfo...

When humanoid robots learn complex sensorimotor abilities from interaction with the environment, often a human experimenter is required. For a social companion robot, it is desirable that the learning can also be assisted by non-expert users. To achieve this aim, we present an embodied dialogue system which enables a humanoid to take on an active r...

Proceedings of the Full Day Workshop, in Conjunction with IEEE Ro-Man 2017 in Portugal - We propose an institutional robotics approachto the design of socially-aware multi-robot systems, wherecooperation among the robots and their social interactions withhumans are guided using institutions. Inspired by the conceptsstemming from economical science...

The purpose of the present study is to learn emotion expression representations for artificial agents using reward shaping mechanisms. The approach takes inspiration from the TAMER framework for training a Multilayer Percep-tron (MLP) to learn to express different emotions on the iCub robot in a human-robot interaction scenario. The robot uses a co...

The purpose of the present study is to learn emotion expression representations for artificial agents using reward shaping mechanisms. The approach takes inspiration from the TAMER framework for training a Multilayer Percep-tron (MLP) to learn to express different emotions on the iCub robot in a human-robot interaction scenario. The robot uses a co...

The purpose of the present study is to learn emotion expression representations for artificial agents using reward shaping mechanisms. The approach takes inspiration from the TAMER framework for training a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to learn to express different emotions on the iCub robot in a human-robot interaction scenario. The robot uses a com...

Multilinear Grammar (MLG) is an approach to integrating the many different syntagmatic structures of language into a coherent architecture, the Rank-Interpretation Architecture. The architecture defines ranks from discourse structure through utterances, phrasal structures, word structures to speech sounds. Each rank has its own specific kind of pro...

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...

Similarity is a core notion that is used in psychology, theoretical and computational linguistics. The similarity datasets that come from the two fields differ in design: psychological datasets are focused around a certain topic such as fruit names; linguistic datasets contain words from various categories. The later makes humans assign low similar...

In this paper, we present an integrated approach to knowledge representation for cognitive robots. We combine knowledge about robot tasks, interaction objects including their geometric shapes, the environment, and natural language in a common ontological description. This description is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and allows to automat...

Proceedings of the Full Day Workshop, in Conjunction with Humanoids-2015 in South Korea

Zellig Harris proposed a method for grouping phonemes in an utterance into morphemes by simply using counts of each of the phonemes in a corpus relative to their position in sequences contained in the data set. Thus, using an n-gram model, one can model this process and see whether a computational model can actually group representations of phoneme...

We present computational experiments on language segmen-tation using a general information-theoretic cognitive model. We present a method which uses the statistical regularities of language to segment a continuous stream of symbols into " meaningful units " at a range of levels. Given a string of symbols—in the present approach, textual representat...

This paper seeks to situate computational creativity within the context of ongoing theoretical and practical investigations of environmentally situated and dynamic systems. Beginning with a consideration of the evidently goal directed nature of creativity, the problem of how teleological behaviour emerges in a fundamentally physical world. Creativi...

In this contribution the authors examine robotics research itself. We look at the data which the European funded ECHORD project (European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development) generated. The project began in January 2009 with the ambitious goal of bringing togeth-er European robotics manufacturers with the European research institutions and...

In order for artificial intelligent systems to interact naturally with human users, they need to be able to learn from human instructions when actions should be imitated. Human tutoring will typically consist of action demonstrations accompanied by speech. In the following, the characteristics of human tutoring during action demonstration will be e...

This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learni...

The European funded ECHORD project European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development began in January 2009 with the ambitious goal of bringing together European robotics manufacturers with the excellent European research institutions. Europe has a very strong robot industry and there is significant research potential as well as technological kn...

Dr. Alexander Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He is the director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies, a joint center at eight international research institutions world-wide. The Center develops multimodal and mu...

The work at hand addresses the question: What kind of navigation behavior do humans expect from a robot in a path crossing scenario? To this end, we developed the ”Inverse Oz of Wizard” study design where participants steered a robot in a scenario in which an instructed person is crossing the robot’s path. We investigated two aspects of robot behav...

In this paper we address the question how a human would expect a robot to move when a human is crossing its way. In particular we consider the problem that physical capabilities of robots differ from humans. In order to find out how humans expect a robot, with non humanlike capabilities, to move we designed and conducted a study were the participan...

Economic games in field settings have been subject to criticism concerning their ecological validity. We use social identity theory and the intergroup contact hypothesis as a framework to illustrate how economic games can be applied to field settings with higher ecological validity. A quasi-experiment in two rural Cameroonian villages studied parti...

We designed a laboratory study to investigate the influence of social interaction on category learning. The objective in the present study is to examine what kind of teaching behavior can improve an agent’s learning of categories. In a computer-based study participants learned four categories for sixteen objects which appear on a computer screen. T...

We propose an approach for the representation of actions based on the conceptual spaces framework developed by Gärdenfors (2004). Action categories are regarded as properties in the sense of Gärdenfors (2011) and are understood as convex regions in action space. Action categories are mainly described by a force signature that represents the forces...

We present an approach to the unsupervised induction of constructions for a specific domain. The main features of our approach are that i) it does not require any supervision in the form of explicit tutoring, ii) it learns pairings between form and meaning and iii) it induces complex syntactic constructions (and their arguments) together with a map...

We present a set of experiments on category learning in which a human or artificial agent has to learn to master a task that requires to properly manipulate unknown objects. The agent learns to master the task by exploiting the feedback provided by a tutor. These experiments extend Morlino et al (2010) to take into account how social interaction bo...

The study of endangered languages can reveal interesting information about how languages adapt to changes in the environment of their speakers and particularly to changes in their culture. This article introduces two understudied Cameroonian languages at different stages of endangerment: Wawa (endangered) and Njanga (moribund). Njanga has been repl...