Selma Yilmazyildiz

• Doctor of Engineering
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel

As a young and emerging field in social Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Semantic Free Utterances (SFUs) research has been receiving attention over the last decade. SFUs are an auditory interaction means for machines that allow emotion and intent expression, which are composed of vocalizations and sounds without semantic content or language dependenc...

Recent technological advancements bring virtual agents, avatars, and social robotic characters into our daily lives. These characters must acquire the ability to express (simulated) emotions vocally and gesturally. In the vocal channel, Natural Language Interaction technologies today have some limitations when used in real-world natural environment...

Probo is a social robot intended to comfort and emotionally interact with hospitalized children. Therefore it requires the ability to express emotions. In order to do so, an emotional interface is developed to fully configure the display of emotions. The emotions, represented as a vector in an emotion space, are mapped to the degrees of freedom use...

Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) is an essential step towards autonomous human-robot interaction. It enables simulating and modeling the interaction, moreover it allows the collection of data and experimenting without relying on specific system components. In child-robot interaction studies with the WoZ setup, the wizard speaks with the children through the robo...

In this contribution we explore the relation between the physical appearance of robots and human expectations concerning the sound of their voices

Gibberish speech consists of vocalizations of meaningless strings of speech sounds. It is sometimes used by performing artists or by cartoon animations (e.g.: Teletubbies) to express intended emotions, without pronouncing any actually understandable word. The facts that no understandable text has to be pronounced and that only affect is conveyed cr...

In this paper we present our study on expressive gibberish speech synthesis as a means for affective communication between computing devices, such as a robot or an avatar, and their users. Gibberish speech consists of vocalizations of meaningless strings of speech sounds and is sometimes used by performing artists to express intended (and often exa...

Nowadays robots are being created that interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. Following this trend, the development of the social robot Probo has started. The robot will be used in hospitals, as a tele-interface for entertainment, communication and medical assistance. Therefore, it requires the ability to express emoti...

This paper presents our recent and current work on expressive speech synthesis and recognition as enabling technologies for affective robot-child interaction. We show that current expression recognition systems could be used to discriminate between several archetypical emotions, but also that the old adage ”there’s no data like more data” is more t...

A dream alike is shared today in the robotics community to develop a personal autonomous humanoid robot. Imagine a robot whose legged structure is perfectly adapted to the human environment and which is able to walk around and perform some standard household duties, relieving its owners even from the task of instructing him to attend these duties....