Toward Robotic Socially Believable Behaving Systems Volume I

This volume is a collection of research studies on the modeling of emotions in complex autonomous systems. Several experts in the field are reporting their efforts and reviewing the literature in order to shed lights on how the processes of coding and decoding emotional states took place in humans, which are the physiological, physical, and psychological variables involved, invent new mathematical models and algorithms to describe them, and motivate these investigations in the light of observable societal changes and needs, such as the aging population and the cost of health care services. The consequences are the implementation of emotionally and socially believable machines, acting as helpers into domestic spheres, where emotions drive behaviors and actions. The contents of the book are highly multidisciplinary since the modeling of emotions in robotic socially believable systems requires a holistic perspective on topics coming from different research domains such as computer science, engineering, sociology, psychology, linguistic, and information communication. The book is of interest both to experts and students since last research works on a so complex multidisciplinary topic are described in a neat and didactical scientific language.

This volume presents a collection of research studies on sophisticated and functional computational instruments able to recognize, process, and store relevant situated interactional signals, as well as, interact with people, displaying reactions (under conditions of limited time) that show abilities of appropriately sensing and understanding environmental changes, producing suitable, autonomous, and adaptable responses to various social situations. These social robotic autonomous systems will improve the quality of life of their end-users while assisting them on several needs, ranging from educational settings, health care assistance, communicative disorders, and any disorder impairing either their physical, cognitive, or social functional activities. The multidisciplinary themes presented in the volume will be interesting for experts and students coming from different research fields and with different knowledge and backgrounds. The research reported is particularly relevant for academic centers, and Research & Development Institutions.

This book provides an overview of the current advances in artificial intelligence and neural nets. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have shown great capabilities in modelling, prediction and recognition tasks supporting human–machine interaction. At the same time, the issue of emotion has gained increasing attention due to its relevance in achieving human-like interaction with machines. The real challenge is taking advantage of the emotional characterization of humans’ interactions to make computers interfacing with them emotionally and socially credible. The book assesses how and to what extent current sophisticated computational intelligence tools might support the multidisciplinary research on the characterization of appropriate system reactions to human emotions and expressions in interactive scenarios. Discussing the latest recent research trends, innovative approaches and future challenges in AI from interdisciplinary perspectives, it is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in academia and industry.

This book presents a collection of contributions in the field of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The themes addressed are multidisciplinary in nature, and closely connected in their ultimate aim to identify features from dynamic realistic signal exchanges and invariant machine representations that can be exploited to improve the quality of life of their end users. Mathematical tools like ANNs are currently exploited in many scientific domains because of their solid theoretical background and effectiveness in providing solutions to many demanding tasks such as appropriately processing (both for extracting features and recognizing) mono- and bi-dimensional dynamic signals, solving strong nonlinearities in the data and providing general solutions for deep and fully connected architectures. Given the multidisciplinary nature of their use and the interdisciplinary characterization of the problems they are applied to – which range from medicine to psychology, industrial and social robotics, computer vision, and signal processing (among many others) – ANNs may provide a basis for redefining the concept of information processing. These reflections are supported by theoretical models and applications presented in the chapters of this book. This book is of primary importance for: (a) the academic research community, (b) the ICT market, (c) PhD students and early-stage researchers, (d) schools, hospitals, rehabilitation and assisted-living centers, and (e) representatives of multimedia industries and standardization bodies.

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents, reason, decide how to interact, and express attitudes such as emotions, engagement, or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors, with the goal to support humans in various domains. Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs, while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students, and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved. In two volumes, the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research, in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior, focusing on multimodality. Finally, social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction, examined from different angles such as interaction in social space, group interaction, or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education, aging support, autism, and games.

The two volume set LNCS 13258 and 13259 constitutes the proceedings of the International Work-Conference on the Interplay Between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2022, held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain in May – June 2022. The total of 121 contributions was carefully reviewed and selected from 203 submissions. The papers are organized in two volumes, with the following topical sub-headings: Part I: Machine Learning in Neuroscience; Neuromotor and Cognitive Disorders; Affective Analysis; Health Applications Part II: Affective Computing in Ambient Intelligence; Bioinspired Computing Approaches; Machine Learning in Computer Vision and Robot; Deep Learning; Artificial Intelligence Applications.

The book is based on interdisciplinary research on various aspects and dynamics of human multimodal signal exchanges. It discusses realistic application scenarios where human interaction is the focus, in order to identify new methods for data processing and data flow coordination through synchronization, and optimization of new encoding features combining contextually enacted communicative signals, and develop shared digital data repositories and annotation standards for benchmarking the algorithmic feasibility and successive implementation of believable human–computer interaction (HCI) systems. This book is a valuable resource for a. the research community, PhD students, early stage researchers c. schools, hospitals, and rehabilitation and assisted-living centers e. the ICT market, and representatives from multimedia industries