The Recognition of Engagement in Human-Robot Dialogs

Candy Sidner
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 6:30 PM
Constant Contact
1601 Trapelo Road
Waltham, MA 02451-7357

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Abstract:

This talk will discuss research we have been conducting on the recognition of engagement and a re-usable module for engagement recognition in human-robot dialogs. I will discuss observations from studying human-human dialogues in which people undertake tasks that not only require them to discuss and collaborate, but also to make use of deictic gestures and mutual facial gaze. I will discuss our results on evaluation of this data and the notion of "connection events" in dialogue. I will then describe a re-usable module for recognition of these events by a robot. I will demonstrate results of our efforts in the "pointing game." This work is joint with Prof. Chuck Rich, and students Aaron Holroyd and Brett Ponsler at WPI.

Bio:

Candy Sidner has a long standing interest in human communication and collaboration, and their application to agents, robots, and interfaces, especially those using gesture, social behavior, speech, and natural language. She is currently a Research Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a Division scientist at BAE Systems AIT.
She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a senior member of the IEEE. She serves as an associate editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence, on several conference advisory boards and was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1989). She received her Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.

Evening Schedule:

6:30-7	Networking & Socializing over Tea, Coffee, Drinks, Food; Joining BostonCHI
7-8:30	Meeting
8:30-9	Dessert! ... And more Networking & Socializing