Robots and People Collaborating: How to be an Engaging Robot
Speaker: Candy Sidner, BAE Systems AIT
Date: Friday, March 14 2008
Time: 3:00PM to 4:00PM
Refreshments: 2:45PM
Location: Star Seminar Room D463
Host: Rob Miller, MIT CSAIL
Contact: Michael Bernstein, x3-0452, msbernst@mit.edu
Relevant URL: Please note that this HCI Seminar is taking place at an unusual time and location.
When people collaborate, in addition to using language to talk to one another, they also employ a variety of verbal and non-verbal means to initiate, maintain and terminate their interaction. In face-to-face interaction, this process of "engagement" often occurs through gestures. In this talk I will describe the engagement process, especially how people maintain engagement through mutual looking and conversational nodding. I will report on studies of people collaborating with a robot and show several videos of these interactions. Finally, I will discuss recent research on initiating engagement, and show videos of two different robots finding and engaging a person.
Speaker Biography:
Candy Sidner is an expert in multi-modal user interfaces, especially those using speech, natural language understanding, and collaboration. Candy is currently a division scientist at BAE Systems AIT where her current efforts are directed at project management and issues related to curriculum development in the DARPA Bootstrapped Learning project. She recently worked on human-robot interaction,focused on the role of engagement in those interactions, and on interface applications involving collaborative interface agents in the COLLAGEN project.
She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the scientific advisory board for the EU Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants (CoSy) project. She has served as general chair for HLT-NAACL 2007, program cochair of Intelligent User Interfaces 2006, cochair of SIGDIAL 2004, chair of Intelligent User Interfaces in 2001, and is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.
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