Britta Wrede

Bielefeld University · Medical Faculty OWL

Although decision support systems (DSS) that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly provide explanations to computer and data scientists about opaque features of the decision process, especially when it involves uncertainty, there is still only limited attention to making the process transparent to end users. This paper compares four dis...

In this article, we present RISE—a R obotics I ntegration and S cenario-Management E xtensible-Architecture—for designing human–robot dialogs and conducting Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. In current HRI research, interdisciplinarity in the creation and implementation of interaction studies is becoming increasingly important. In addition, th...

Explanation has been identified as an important capability for AI-based systems, but research on systematic strategies for achieving understanding in interaction with such systems is still sparse. Negation is a linguistic strategy that is often used in explanations. It creates a contrast space between the affirmed and the negated item that enriches...

Emotions play an important role in human decision-making. However, first approaches to incorporating knowledge of this influence into AI-based decision support systems are only very recent. Accordingly, our target is to develop an interactive intelligent agent that is capable of explaining the recommendations of AI-systems while taking emotional co...

Humans have developed the capability to teach relevant aspects of new or adapted tasks to a social peer with very few task demonstrations by making use of scaffolding strategies that leverage prior knowledge and importantly prior joint experience to yield a joint understanding and a joint execution of the required steps to solve the task. This proc...

Digital assistance has increasingly been implemented to cognitively support employees and enhance efficiency in different working environments. However, implementations of current assistance systems are often too rigid to provide personalised support, which can restrict employees’work autonomy. Therefore, in this chapter we discuss opportunities to...

How do we switch between "playing along" and treating robots as technical agents? We propose interaction breakdowns to help solve this "social artifact puzzle": Breaks cause changes from fluid interaction to explicit reasoning and interaction with the raw artifact. These changes are closely linked to understanding the technical architecture and cou...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of distractions and hesitations as a scaffolding strategy. Recent research points to the potential beneficial effects of a speaker’s hesitations on the listeners’ comprehension of utterances, although results from studies on this issue indicate that humans do not make strategic use of them. The role of hesit...

With the perspective on applications of AI-technology, especially data intensive deep learning approaches, the need for methods to control and understand such models has been recognized and gave rise to a new research domain labeled explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this overview paper we give an interim appraisal of what has been achie...

Modified action demonstration—dubbed motionese—has been proposed as a way to help children recognize the structure and meaning of actions. However, until now, it has been investigated only in young infants. This brief research report presents findings from a cross-sectional study of parental action demonstrations to three groups of 8–11, 12–23, and...

Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user’s satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in naturally interacting with robots, and might hurt their ability to correctly anticipate a robot’s capabilities....

Technology, especially cognitive agents and robots, has significant potential to improve the healthcare system and patient care. However, innovation within academia seldomly finds its way into practice. At least in Germany, there is still a digitalization gap between academia and healthcare practice and little understanding of how healthcare facili...

In recent years, an increased effort has been invested to improve the capabilities of robots. Nevertheless, human-robot interaction remains a complex field of application where errors occur frequently. The reasons for these errors can primarily be divided into two classes. Foremost, the recent increase in capabilities also widened possible sources...

Zusammenfassung Ziel der Studie Ziel der Studie war die Bereitstellung von Ergebnissen zur Nutzung von Teletherapie während der Corona-Pandemie durch Vertreter*innen von drei Gesundheitsfachberufen. Methoden Im Rahmen einer fragebogengestützten Online-Erhebung wurden 282 Beschäftigte der Ergotherapie, Physiotherapie und Sprachtherapie/Logopädie zu...

The recent surge of interest in explainability in artificial intelligence (XAI) is propelled by not only technological advancements in machine learning, but also by regulatory initiatives to foster transparency in algorithmic decision making. In this article, we revise the current concept of explainability and identify three limitations: passive ex...

Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user's satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in naturally interacting with robots, and might actually hurt their ability to correctly anticipate a robot's capab...

Virtual reality is a powerful tool for industrial applications. The article at hand addresses designers of industrial virtual environments. It summarizes key aspects to design immersive and coherent virtual environments. Furthermore, relevant influencing factors for a high quality virtual environment and tools to quantify this quality are presented...

Preventing humans from committing errors is a crucial aspect of man-machine interaction and systems of computer assistance. It is a basic implication that those systems need to recognise errors before they occur. This paper reports an exploratory study that utilises eye-tracking technology and automated face recognition in order to analyse test per...

This article discusses the systematic design of the robot feedback for users in a stationary human-robot cooperation scenario. The design cycle starts with the analysis of related work and the capabilities of the human-robot system. It is followed by an online questionnaire with 100 participants to discover relevant information and modalities. A fi...

Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading the text can be equipped with hesitations to manage dialogue flow and user attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we elaborated a hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems, which inserts hesitations of a scalable extent wherever needed...

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...

In this paper we present the implementation of a robot, that dynamically hesitates, based on the attention of the human interaction partner. To this end, we outline requirements for a real-time interaction scenario, describe the realization of a disfluency insertion strategy, and present observations from the first tests of the system.

In language production research, the latency with which speakers produce a spoken response to a stimulus and the onset and offset times of words in longer utterances are key dependent variables. Measuring these variables automatically often yields partially incorrect results. However, exact measurements through the visual inspection of the recordin...

Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading text can be equipped with hesitations to manage the dialogue flow and the users' attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we built an elaborated hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems that inserts hesitations of scalable extent wherev...

Interactive storytelling is a social situation that places a number of demands on a system when realized by an artificial agent. It can be used as a means of teaching or entertainment by a social robot or agent. To be successful, the storytelling has to be interesting and responsive. An agent needs to be aware of the user's state and coordinate the...

In this paper we present an interaction model for incremental information presentation for situated human-agent assistive systems, which support a user in daily activities such as packing a bag or fetching ingredients for a cake or a menu. In a smart home interaction scenario, we provide a first realization as a proof of concept for our approach.

This article discusses the relevance of the motion behavior and adaptation of a collaborative robot for human-robot cooperation. Two experiments on cooperative assembly are shown. First, a human-human experiment with defined test conditions evaluates the aspects of distance, nearest body part, and predictability as significant. Second, a human-robo...

Even if only the acoustic channel is considered, human communication is highly multi-modal. Non-lexical cues provide a variety of information such as emotion or agreement. The ability to process such cues is highly relevant for spoken dialog systems, especially in assistance systems. In this paper we focus on the recognition of non-lexical confirma...

In Mensch-Roboter-Arbeitszellen werden Teile eines Produktionsablaufs von einem Menschen, andere von einem kollaborativen Roboter und wieder andere kooperativ in einem gemeinsamen Arbeitsbereich durchgeführt. Bisher werden das Potenzial und der Mehrwert dieser Systeme noch nicht ausgeschöpft, weshalb ein systematischer Ansatz zur Definition der Arb...

In Mensch-Roboter-Arbeitszellen werden Teile eines Produktionsablaufs von einem Menschen, andere von einem kollaborativen Roboter und wieder andere kooperativ in einem gemeinsamen Arbeitsbereich durchgeführt. Bisher werden das Potenzial und der Mehrwert dieser Systeme noch nicht ausgeschöpft, weshalb ein systematischer Ansatz zur Definition der Arb...

Many studies emphasize the importance of infant-directed speech: stronger articulated, higher-quality speech helps infants to better distinguish different speech sounds. This effect has been widely investigated in terms of the infant's perceptual capabilities, but few studies examined whether infant-directed speech has an effect on articulatory lea...

In this paper we present a human-agent interaction study investigating the effect of incremental (just in time) information presentation on human task performance and the subjective ratings of the agent. On the one hand we show that the task of fetching ingredients and utensils for cooking is better performed in case of incremental information pres...

In aufkommenden Mensch-Roboter-Arbeitszellen werden Teile eines Produktionsablaufes von einem Menschen, andere von einem kollaborativen Roboter und wieder andere kooperativ in einem gemeinsamen Arbeitsbereich durchgeführt. Bisher werden das Potential und der Mehrwert dieser Systeme noch nicht ausgeschöpft, weshalb ein systematischer Ansatz zur Defi...

While cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are able to take into account a lot of information about the physical environment, the respective user of the system is still seen as a black box. As suggested in this chapter, a model of the user will be crucial to ensure optimized system efficiency and user satisfaction in future adaptive and automated work env...

In this paper we present a first exploratory study investigating the effects of a contingently self-interrupting vs non-self-interrupting virtual agent in a smart home environment who transmits information to a human interaction partner. We tested the hypothesis that self-interruptions are a strategy for keeping the user's attention, as measured by...

The purpose of this Wizard-of-Oz study was to explore the intuitive verbal and non-verbal goal-directed behavior of naïve participants in an intelligent robotics apartment. Participants had to complete seven mundane tasks, for instance, they were asked to turn on the light. Participants were explicitly instructed to consider nonstandard ways of com...

The first workshop on embodied interaction with smart environments aims to bring together the very active community of multi-modal interaction research and the rapidly evolving field of smart home technologies. Besides addressing the software architecture of such very complex systems, it puts an emphasis on questions regarding an intuitive interact...

In this paper, we present our humanoid robot "Meka", participating in a multi party human robot dialogue scenario. Active arbitration of the robot's attention based on multi-modal stimuli is utilised to observe persons which are outside of the robots field of view. We investigate the impact of this attention management and addressee recognition on...

We present a computational model that allows us to study the interplay of different processes involved in first language acquisition. We build on the assumption that language acquisition is usage-driven and assume that there are different processes in language acquisition operating at different levels. Bottom-up processing allows a learner to ident...

In this paper we present results of an exploratory experiment investigating the effects of a contingently self-interrupting vs non-self-interrupting virtual agent who transmits information to a human interaction partner. In the experimental condition self-interruptions of the agent were triggered by an external event whereas in the control group th...

One of the big challenges in robotics today is to learn from human users that are inex- perienced in interacting with robots but yet are often used to teach skills exibly to other humans and to children in particular. A potential route toward natural and ef cient learning and teaching in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to leverage the social compe...

In this paper, we present an empirical study with children at the age of 4 and 5 years to reveal whether they engage with a robot in an interaction. For our analysis, we developed a score assessing the interaction level. It consists of emotional involvement, engagement and independence of the child in the interaction. For the interaction, an autono...

We use goal babbling to bootstrap a parametric model of speech production for a complex 3D vocal tract model. The system learns to control the articulators for producing five different vowel sounds. Ambient speech influences learning on two levels: it organizes the learning process because it is used to generate a space of goals in which exploratio...

With the increase in customized production scenarios with small batch sizes research on human-robot working cells gains significance. We present a Smart Workbench that allows for adaptive user assistance in industrial human-robot use cases through (1) monitoring the user condition and (2) providing multi-modal information about the process and the...

The classic mapping metaphor posits that children learn a word by mapping it onto a concept of an object or event. However, we believe that a mapping metaphor cannot account for word learning, because even though children focus attention on objects, they do not necessarily remember the connection between the word and the referent unless it is frame...

Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our u...

This paper proposes an efficient neural network model for learning the articulatory-acoustic forward and inverse mapping of consonant-vowel sequences including coarticulation effects. It is shown that the learned models can generalize vowels as well as consonants to other contexts and that the need for supervised training examples can be reduced by...

In this paper, we present a first step towards incremental processing for modeling asynchronous human-robot interactions, to allow closed feedback loops in HRI. We achieve this by combining the incremental natural language processing framework InproTK with the human-robot dialog manager PaMini, which is based on generic interaction patterns. This e...

Based on different psychological models of emotion, we argue that an intrapersonal account of emotion is not sufficient. Rather, we need interpersonal accounts of emotion that go beyond the assumption that a communicative agent simply displays her internal affective state and takes situational aspects into account. In this paper a computational mod...

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...

Research of tutoring in parent-infant interaction has shown that tutors - when presenting some action - modify both their verbal and manual performance for the learner (‘motherese’, ‘motionese’). Investigating the sources and effects of the tutors’ action modifications, we suggest an interactional account of ‘motionese’. Using video-data from a sem...

Alignment is a phenomenon observed in human conversation: Dialog partners’ behavior converges in many respects. Such alignment has been proposed to be automatic and the basis for communicating successfully. Recent research on human-computer dialog promotes a mediated communicative design account of alignment according to which the extent of alignme...

Robot learning by imitation requires the detection of a tutor's action demonstration and its relevant parts. Current approaches implicitly assume a unidirectional transfer of knowledge from tutor to learner. The presented work challenges this predominant assumption based on an extensive user study with an autonomously interacting robot. We show tha...

Robots are not human. They might in some cases have a similar appearance but different behavioral and cognitive strengths and limitations. In this sense, an interaction with a robot is asymmetric. When interacting with a robot one is unsure what behavior to expect as the appearance does not necessarily make the abilities of the robot transparent. I...

If they are to learn and interact with humans, robots need to understand actions and make use of language in social interactions. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996) have emphasized the use of language to learn actions when introducing the idea of acoustic packaging in human development. This idea suggests that acoustic information, typically in the f...

The Visual Focus of Attention (what or whom a person is looking at) or VFOA is a fundamental cue in non-verbal communication and plays an important role when designing effective human-machine interaction systems. However, recognizing the VFOA of an interacting person is difficult for a robot, since due to low resolution imaging, eye gaze estimation...

For sound localization, the binaural auditory system of a robot needs audio-motor maps, which represent the relationship between certain audio features and the position of the sound source. This mapping is normally learned during an offline calibration in controlled environments, but we show that using computational audiovisual scene analysis (CAVS...

We show how incompressibility, a well-described property of some prosodic timing effects, can be accounted for in an optimization-based model of speech timing. Preliminary results of a corpus study are presented, replicating and generalizing previous findings on incompressibility as a function of increas-ing speaking rate. We then introduce the arc...

Human learning strongly depends on the ability to structure the actions of teachers in order to identify relevant parts. We propose that this is also true for learning in robots. Therefore, we apply a method for multimodal action segmen-tation called Acoustic Packaging to a corpus of pairs of users teaching object names to a robot. Going beyond pre...

Interlocutors in a dialog align on many aspects of behavior (word choice, speech rate, syntactic structure, gestures, facial expressions, etc.). Such alignment has been proposed to be the basis for communicating successfully. We believe alignment could be beneficial for smooth human-robot interaction and facilitate robot action learning from demons...

Social robots are often applied in recreational contexts to improve the experience of using technical systems, but they are also increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. In this study, we compared how patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interact with a social robot and a human actor. We examined the gaze behavior of nine ASD patients an...

In several research areas, e.g. in the field of human-robot interaction, ratings or questionnaires are applied using offline and online methods. An argument for the use of online methods is the efficiency. By using the Internet, data can be collected much faster than in an offline experiment and the administration effort is very low. The goal of ou...

Previously, we applied a distribution equalization on our HIerarchical Spectro-Temporal (HIST) features using distributions estimated from histogram of one or several utterances. Although a performance increase could be observed in both cases, we noticed low performance improvement when estimating the distribution only from one utterance. The aim h...

This article deals with the application of social robots (embodied agents, which are able to communicate) in speech therapy. There is much research in the field of new technologies in healthcare. However, there are only a few studies on social robots in speech therapy. The investigation presented is a first step to identify the opinions of speech a...

This paper gives an overview of the research papers published in Symbol Grounding in the period from the beginning of the 21st century up 2012. The focus is in the use of symbol grounding for robotics and intelligent system. The review covers a number of subtopics, that include, physical symbol grounding, social symbol grounding, symbol grounding f...

Our contribution situates Human-Robot Communication, especially the grounding of Natural Kind Terms, in the interface of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Robotics and Semantics. We investigate whether a robot can be grounded in the sense favoured in Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy. We thus extend the notion of groun...

In this paper, we investigate the impact the contingency of robot feedback may have on the quality of verbal human-robot interaction. In order to assess not only what the effects are but also what they are caused by, we carried out experiments in which naïve participants instructed the humanoid robot iCub on a set of shapes and on a stacking task i...

Real world environments are so dynamic and unpredictable that a goal-oriented autonomous system performing a set of tasks repeatedly never experiences the same situation even though the task routines are the same. Hence, manually designed solutions to execute such tasks are likely to fail due to such variations. Developmental approaches seek to sol...

In social interaction between humans, expressing, recognizing, and understanding emotions is essential [10]. In human interaction, emotions can influence both motivation and conversational content [7]. It is assumed that this is also true for human-robot interaction because social signals (like emotional expressions) produced by robots are processe...

We introduce a new conversational Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) dataset with a real-behaving robot inducing interactive behavior with and between humans. Our scenario involves a humanoid robot NAO1 explaining paintings in a room and then quizzing the participants, who are naive users. As perceiving nonverbal cues, apart from the spoken words, plays...

The communication of emotion is a crucial part of daily life interaction. Therefore, we carried out a study to research which role emotional congruence plays in human-human and human-robot interaction. In our results there is no effect of emotional incongruence between verbal content and facial expression of human as well as robotic stimuli on the...

Previously, we applied a distribution equalization on our Hierarchical Spectro-Temporal (HIST) features us- ing empirical distributions estimated from one or a re- duced set of utterances. Although a performance in- crease could be observed in both cases, we noticed low performance improvement when estimating the distribu- tion only from one uttera...

In accordance with accumulating evidence from research, we assume a strong but flexible relation between emotional and communicative alignment in interaction. The communicative function of emotional adaptation, the processing of emotions on all linguistic levels and the empirical evidence in studies with neurological patient groups support our appr...

If they are to learn and interact with humans, robots need to understand actions and make use of language in social interactions. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996) have emphasized the use of language to learn actions when introducing the idea of acoustic packaging in human development. This idea suggests that acoustic information, typically in the f...

In this paper, we propose a saliency model which can be used to guide eye movements for viewing a goal-directed action video. The model employs top-down and bottom-up saliency components which work purely on contrasts of random pixels in the image. We construct task specific spatio-temporal priors and integrate them into the top-down and bottom-up...

Computational modelling of visual saliency has been an active area of research since the last two decades. It has profound impact on robotics as it helps in automatically selecting visually interesting regions from a given scene. A model of visual saliency generates a saliency map - which is a two-dimensional representation of the visual scene - wh...

In this paper we present an incremental word learning system that is able to cope with few training data samples to enable speech acquisition in on-line human robot interaction. As with most automatic speech recognition systems (ASR), our architecture relies on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) framework where the different word models are sequentially t...