1,721,015 research outputs found
Locate your soundscape: interacting with the acoustic environment
Full text linkAlthough overshadowed by visual information, sound plays a central role in how people perceive an environment. The effect of a landscape is enriched by its soundscape, that is, the stratification of all the acoustic sources that, often unconsciously, are heard. This paper presents a framework for archiving, browsing, and accessing soundscapes, either remotely or on-site. The framework is based on two main components: a web-based interface to upload and search the recordings of an acoustic environment, enriched by in- formation about geolocation, timing, and context of the recording; and a mobile app to browse and listen to the recordings, using an interactive map or GPS information. To populate the archive, we launched two crowdsourcing initiatives. An initial experiment examined the city of Padua’s soundscape through the participation of a group of undergraduate students. A broader experiment, which was proposed to all people in Italy, aimed at tracking how the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown was dramatically changing the soundscape of the entire country
Automatic emotion recognition from facial expressions when wearing a mask
No full textPeople communicate emotions through several nonverbal channels and facial expressions play an important part in this communicative process. Automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is a very hot topic that has attracted a lot of interest in the last years. Most FER systems try to recognize emotions from the entire face of a person. Unfortunately, due to pandemic situation, people wear a mask most of the time, thus their faces are not fully visible. In our study, we investigate the effectiveness of a FER system in recognizing emotions only from the eyes region, which is the sole visible region when wearing a mask by comparing the results of the same approach when applied to the entire face. The proposed pipeline involves several steps: detecting a face in an image, detecting a mask on a face, extracting the eyes region, and recognize the emotion expressed on the basis of such region. As it was expected, emotions that are related mainly to the mouth region (e.g. disgust) are not recognized at all and positive emotions are the ones that are better determined by considering only the region of the eyes
A multimodal interface for robot-children interaction in autism treatment
No full textRecent studies suggest that robots play an important role to cope Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This paper presents a multimodal interface based on a multilevel treatment protocol customized to improve eye contact, joint attention, and imitation. An evaluation of the system has been performed involving 6 high functioning children with autism spectrum disorders. The experiments carried out make it possible to evaluate the behavioral response of the children in the eye contact exercise. ASD children had achieved better results than traditional therapy thanks to the multimodal interface
Artificial intelligence for robot-assisted treatment of autism
No full textDesigning robot-based treatments for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a growing research field. This paper presents an artificial intelligence system based on a robot-assisted treatment of autism. The robot acts as a social mediator, trying to elicit specific behaviors in autistic children. A first preliminary evaluation of the system has been performed involving 3 high functioning children with autism spectrum disorders. The experiments carried out make it possible to evaluate the behavioral response of the children in the eye contact exercise
Pepper as a Storyteller: Exploring the Effect of Human vs. Robot Voice on Children’s Emotional Experience
No full textSocial robots are autonomous entities able to engage humans at the emotional and social level. They are being used in several domains, especially in those where kids are the primary users (i.e., education, games, rehabilitation). The paper presents an experience in which the social robot Pepper is used as a storyteller. A storyteller robot should engage humans by combining its verbal and non-verbal behaviors and ‘immerse’ the user into the story. Therefore, to design an engaging and effective storytelling experience we started to address a first design issue: does a human voice have an advantage over a synthesized voice of the robot in this context? To this aim, two versions of the same story for kids from 8 to 9 y.o. have been developed. The social robot Pepper was used to tell the story in two modalities. In the first modality, Pepper storyteller was designed as a kind of audiobook in which the robot had just the role of a device, but the story was narrated by a human voice; in the second modality, Pepper was designed to tell the story using its own voice combined with non-verbal behaviors. The system has been tested in a real context and results show that Pepper’s voice affected more positively the children’s emotional experience, also by giving the children the perception that they learn more easily
Evaluating natural interaction with a shop window
No full textThis paper ∗ describes the evaluation of two interaction modalities for Active Fashion, the first prototype of system designed for providing interactively information about dresses shown on mannequins in a shop window. Using the system the user may look at available sizes, colors, price and similar products. Due to the nature of such a system, the interaction must be touch-less and natural. The developed solutions use Microsoft Kinect 2 as a device. The first modality is based on gestures while the second one is based on gaze pointing. Evaluation results show that even if the interaction did not result completely satisfying from the control point of view, users prefer the gaze-based approach and felt positively engaged during the interaction
User modeling in social interaction with a caring agent
No full textAmbient Intelligence solutions may provide a great opportunity for elder people to live longer at home. When assistance and care are delegated to the intelligence embedded in the environment, besides considering task-oriented response to the user needs, it is necessary to take into account the establishment of social relations. To this aim, it becomes crucial to model both the rational and the affective components of the user state of mind. In this chapter we mainly focus on the problem of modeling the cognitive and affective variables involved in the definition of a user model suitable for this domain. After providing an overlook of the state of the art, we report about our experience in designing NICA (as the name of the project Natural Interaction with a Caring Agent), a social agent acting as a virtual caregiver able to assist elderly people in a smart environment for taking care of both the physical and mental state of the users
Social Robots to Support Gestural Development in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
No full textChildren with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by impairments in communication and social skills, including problems in understanding and producing gestures. Using the approach of robot-based imitation games, in this paper, we propose the prototype of an imitation game that aims at improving the non-verbal communication skills, gestures in particular, of children with ASD. Starting from an application that we developed in another domain, social inclusion of migrant children, we use a social robot to teach them to recognize and produce social gestures through an imitation game. For allowing the recognition of gestures by the robot, we learned a LSTM-based model using MediaPipe for the analysis of hands positions and landmarks. The model was trained on six selected gestures for recognizing their pattern. The module is then used by the robot in the game. Results from the software accuracy point of view are encouraging and show that the proposed approach is suitable for the purpose of showing and recognizing predefined gestures, however we are aware that in the wild with ASD children it might not work properly. For this reason, in the near future, we will perform a study aiming at assessing the efficacy of the approach with ASD children and revise the model and the game accordingly
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