Socially Aware Robot Assistant SARA is a Socially-Aware Robot Assistant that interacts with people in a whole new way, personalizing the interaction and improving task performance by relying on information about the relationship between the human user and virtual assistant. Rather than taking the place of people, Sara is programmed to collaborate with her human users. Rather than ignoring the socio-emotional bonds that form the fabric of society, SARA depends […]

Intelligent assistants of 2025 In 2014, Yahoo! and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have announced a five-year, $10 million partnership, called the InMind project. The goal of the InMind is to invent, implement, experiment, and iterate with an intelligent assistant for mobile devices. Major companies are already exploring intelligent assistants such as Siri, and Google Now, M, and Cortana, and we expect they will continue to develop these. To make an […]

Beyond the Cooperative Conversation Principle Let us begin by looking at an example of a question asked by one person and answered by another: A : “Do you have any favorite actor or actress?” B : “Yes, my favorite actress is Audrey Hepburn. Audrey is, just as one would expect, a charming and beautiful woman even in her private life!“ In this example, person A asked about person B’s favorite […]

Regulating A Four-Participant Conversation We present a framework for facilitation robots that regulates imbalanced engagement density in four-participant conversation as the forth participant with proper procedures for obtaining initiatives. Four is the special number in multiparty conversations. The three-participant conversation is the minimum unit where the participants autonomously organize a multiparty conversational situation. The fourth participant is the first person who can objectively observe the conversational situation. In three-participant conversations, […]

We proposed a robot that promotes an enjoyable party game as a facilitation robot system. In this task, a robot participates in a quiz game as one of participants and tries to promote the other participants’ enjoyment of the game. The functions implemented in the robot are: (1) The robot participates in the group’s communication using its basic group conversation functions; (2) The robot performs the game according to the […]