United Kingdom

Gestures augment speech by performing a variety of communicative functions in humans and virtual agents, and are often related to speech by complex semantic, rhetorical, prosodic, and affective elements. In this paper we briefly present an architecture for human-like gesturing in virtual agents that is designed to realize complex speech-to-gesture mappings by exploiting existing machine-learning based parsing tools and techniques to extract these functional elements from speech. We then deeply explore the rhetorical branch of this architecture, objectively assessing specifically whether existing rhetorical parsing techniques can classify gestures into classes with distinct movement properties. To do this, we take a corpus of spontaneously generated gestures and correlate their movement to co-speech utterances. We cluster gestures based on their rhetorical properties, and then by their movement. Our objective analysis suggests that some rhetorical structures are identifiable by our movement features while others require further exploration. We explore possibilities behind these findings and propose future experiments that may further reveal nuances of the richness of the mapping between speech and motion. This work builds towards a real-time gesture generator which performs gestures that effectively convey rich communicative functions.

AAMAS 2021

CMCF: An Architecture for Realtime Gesture Generation by Clustering Gestures by Motion and Communicative Function

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
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IEEE RO-MAN 2022

31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

technical paper

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This paper discusses the formalization of a norm enforcement mechanism for a regulative time constrained conditional normative framework. The norm representation captures both the condition and effect of a norm as situations and allows for rich temporal constraints between the times of the situations. As part of the enforcement process, a designated agent has an obligation within a time constraint to inform a liable agent of a reparative action they must take and the time constraint within which they must take it. That same agent must then monitor the compliance of the erring agent’s obligation to carry out the reparative action, meting out sanctions in the case of violation.

A Norm Enforcement Mechanism for a Time-Constrained Conditional Normative Framework (JAAMAS Track)

It is claimed that, in the nascent 'Cognitive Era', intelligent systems will be trained using machine learning techniques rather than programmed by software developers. A contrary point of view argues that machine learning has limitations, and, taken in isolation, cannot form the basis of autonomous systems capable of intelligent behaviour in complex environments. In this paper, we argue that the unique strengths of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent programming languages provide an ideal framework for integrating the wide range of AI capabilities necessary for progress towards the next-generation of intelligent systems.

Agent Programming in the Cognitive Era (JAAMAS Track)

A relevant application domain for agent-based software is given by smart mobile applications. In this context, the impressive progress of technologies makes it possible to explore the use of agent-oriented programming languages and frameworks based on cognitive architectures. Accordingly, here we provide a description of JaCa-Android, a framework based on the JaCaMo platform that allows for designing and programming smart mobile apps using BDI-based cognitive agents within the A&A conceptual model.

Programming Agent-based Mobile Apps: The JaCa-Android Framework (JAAMAS Track)

We describe an approach for constraining robot autonomy based on the robot's awareness of patterns of its human teammates' behaviors, rather than either ignoring its teammates (which is fast but dangerous) or inferring their plans (which is safer but slow). We evaluate this approach in a series of simulated problems where an unmanned ground vehicle and its human teammates must rapidly respond to a sudden context shift, and identify conditions that should be (purposely) met such that a pattern-aware approach is particularly effective compared to the alternatives.

On Teammate-Pattern-Aware Autonomy (JAAMAS Track)

In this work, we propose a framework that enables a human to teach a robot a new task by interactively providing it with unlabeled instructions. We ground the meaning of instruction signals in the task-learning process, and use them simultaneously for guiding the latter. We implement our framework as a modular architecture, named TICS (Task-Instruction-Contingency-Shaping) that combines different information sources: a predefined reward function, human evaluative feedback and unlabeled instructions. This approach provides a novel perspective for robotic task learning that lies between Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning paradigms. We evaluate our framework both in simulation and with a real robot. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in accelerating the task-learning process and in reducing the number of required teaching signals.

Teaching a Robot with Unlabeled Instructions: The TICS Architecture (JAAMAS Track)

Multiagent system models do not typically encompass tools for tackling abnormal or exceptional situations. When a critical situation arises, and individual agents fail, the system as a whole usually fails, too. For realizing robust distributed systems, conceived as agent systems or organizations, it is necessary to keep a right level of situational awareness (of both agents and environment), through the introduction of the means for gathering and propagating feedback, upon which actions can be taken. This work proposes a notion of accountability that encompasses both a normative dimension, and a structural dimension, that serves for the purpose of robustness.

Robustness Based on Accountability in Multiagent Organizations

Community Health Workers (CHWs) form an important component of health-care systems globally, especially in low-resource settings. CHWs are often tasked with monitoring the health of and intervening on their patient cohort. Previous work has developed several classes of Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) that are computationally tractable and indexable, a condition that guarantees asymptotic optimality, for solving such health monitoring and intervention problems (HMIPs). However, existing solutions to HMIPs fail to account for risk-sensitivity considerations of CHWs in the planning stage and may run the danger of ignoring some patients completely because they are deemed less valuable to intervene on. Additionally, these also rely on patients reporting their state of adherence accurately when intervened upon. Towards tackling these issues, our contributions in this paper are as follows: (1) We develop an RMAB solution to HMIPs that allows for reward functions that are monotone increasing, rather than linear, in the belief state and also supports a wider class of observations. (2) We prove theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic optimality of our algorithm for any arbitrary reward function. Additionally, we show that for the specific reward function considered in previous work, our theoretical conditions are stronger than the state-of-the-art guarantees. (3) We show the applicability of these new results for addressing the three issues pertaining to: risk-sensitive planning, equitable allocation and reliance on perfect observations as highlighted above. We evaluate these techniques on both simulated as well as real data from a prevalent CHW task of monitoring adherence of tuberculosis patients to their prescribed medication in Mumbai, India and show improved performance over the state-of-the-art. The simulation code is available at: https://github.com/AdityaMate/risk-aware-bandits.

Risk-Aware Interventions in Public Health: Planning with Restless Multi-Armed Bandits

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in ensuring that autonomous systems behave consistently with human values. A popular approach to this challenge is through the incorporation of norms that regulate behaviour in an ethical way. However, such norms must be effective at promoting the values we consider most important. In this work, we introduce a systematic methodology for the automated synthesis of parametric normative systems based on value promotion. We introduce the new concepts of 
 and 
 To quantify the effectiveness of norms at upholding the values we consider relevant, we adopt the value alignment indicator from a previously established framework. We apply our model to a toy system which we use to illustrate our approach from end to end.

Value-Guided Synthesis of Parametric Normative Systems

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are a suitable formulation for coordinating interactions (i.e. constraints) in cooperative multi-agent systems. The traditional DCOP model assumes that variables owned by the agents can take only discrete values and constraints' cost functions are defined for every possible value assignment of a set of variables. While this formulation is often reasonable, there are many applications where the decision variables are continuous-valued and constraints are in functional form. To overcome this limitation, Continuous DCOPs (C-DCOPs), an extension of the DCOPs model has been proposed that is able to formulate problems having continuous variables. The existing methods for solving C-DCOPs come with a huge computation and communication overhead. In this paper, we apply continuous non-linear optimization methods on Cooperative Constraint Approximation (CoCoA) algorithm, which is a non-iterative, fast incomplete local search approach for solving DCOPs. We empirically show that our algorithm is able to provide high-quality solutions at the expense of smaller communication cost and execution time compared to the state-of-the-art C-DCOP algorithms.

A Local Search Based Approach to Solve Continuous DCOPs

In multi-agent systems the main process responsible for obtaining information about the environment is perception, generally this process is performed passively regardless the agent's intentional state. However, especially when inserted in the real world, a frequent problem is that agents have partial perception of the environment, failing to perceive some relevant information. To circumvent this problem, a solution is to actively take actions to perceive what is of interest to the agent, for example, in a computer vision system, the camera can be repositioned to have a better view of an object. This work aims to develop an active perception model integrated with the reasoning cycle of BDI agents. Experiments are performed using BDI agents with ROS to command unmanned aerial vehicles to analyze the benefits and impacts of using cognitive agents with active perception to program robot intelligence.

CMCF: An Architecture for Realtime Gesture Generation by Clustering Gestures by Motion and Communicative Function

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A Norm Enforcement Mechanism for a Time-Constrained Conditional Normative Framework (JAAMAS Track)

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CMCF: An Architecture for Realtime Gesture Generation by Clustering Gestures by Motion and Communicative Function

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Next from AAMAS 2021

A Norm Enforcement Mechanism for a Time-Constrained Conditional Normative Framework (JAAMAS Track)

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Hot or not? Exploring User Perceptions of thermal Human-Robot Interaction

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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