Expressive behaviour as a social signal for socially-competent human-robot interaction: Expre-ss

旅行补助金将支持为具体化的社会代理人创造机制的工作，这些代理人应用心智理论（ToM）能力来检测和管理其自己的模拟情感状态和由此产生的表达行为。这将支持开发适合更广泛应用的更具社会竞争力的代理。它来自于目前正在进行的SoCoRo项目（EP/N034546/1），该项目研究使用表达机器人来帮助患有自闭症的高功能成年人进行社交信号处理。社会代理人是图形化或机器人化的实体，旨在在日常人类社会环境中有能力和成功地行动。这些地方可以是家庭、学校、工作场所，或者更多的公共场所，比如购物中心和博物馆。众所周知，人类将社会代理归于这些具身实体，因此假设人类使用自己的社会信号来调节互动并表现出他们的感受或想法。出于这个原因，嵌入社会代理的研究人员长期致力于代理的表达行为——面部表情、发声、手势、姿势，无论是图形代理还是机器人代理。生成富有表现力的行为（不同于通过预先注释的对话项编写脚本）需要一个能够对情感响应建模的体系结构。这样的架构应该基于健全的心理学理论，但应该超越社会主体仅仅表达其自身内部状态的相当简单的想法。一个微笑可以意味着很多东西，而不仅仅是一种内心的快乐状态，一个被老板斥责的员工不太可能表达他们可能感到的愤怒。社会信号是社会性的，因为它们考虑到社会背景以及这些信号可能对互动伙伴产生的影响。激励教育、为老年人提供支持、参与角色扮演、培训应用或治疗的社会行动者都需要这种能力。差旅补助金将支持对可在现有社会代理架构中实施的通用机制进行调查。申请人将与日内瓦大学的主要理论家一起工作，然后与里斯本大学和南加州大学的两个领先的代理架构的建设者一起工作。

The travel grant would support work creating mechanisms for embodied social agents that apply theory of mind (ToM) capabilities to the detection and management by the agent of its own modelled affective state and the expressive behaviour it generates as a result. This will support the development of more socially competent agents suitable for a wider range of applications. It flows from work currently being conducted in the project SoCoRo (EP/N034546/1), investigating the use of an expressive robot to help high-functioning adults with autism with social signal processing.Social agents are graphically or robotically embodied entities designed to act competently and successfully in everyday human social environments. These could be homes, schools, workplaces, or more public spaces, like shopping malls and museums. It is well-established that humans impute social agency to such embodied entities and therefore assume competence in the social signals humans use themselves to regulate interaction and to manifest what they feel or think. For this reason, researchers in embodied social agents have long worked on agent expressive behaviour - facial expressions, vocalisations, gestures, posture, both for graphical and robotic agents.Generating expressive behaviour (as distinct from scripting via pre-annotated dialogue items) requires an architecture that can model affective responses. Such an architecture should be based on sound psychological theory, but should move beyond the rather simple idea that the social agent merely expresses its own internal state. A smile can mean very many things other than an internal state of happiness and an employee being dressed down by their boss is unlikely to express the anger they may feel. Social signals are social because they take into account the social context and the impact such signals may make on interaction partners. Social agents that motivate in education, offer support to the elderly, are involved in role-play, in training applications or in therapy all need this capability.The travel grant will support an investigation of generic mechanisms that can be implemented in existing social agent architectures. The applicant will work with leading theorists at University of Geneva and then with the builders of the two leading agent architectures in University of Lisbon and University of Southern California.