Advanced Topics in AI and Robotics

Conversational interaction with embodied and situated artificial agents - such as social robots - goes beyond a simple "ping-pong" of clearly articulated, well-formed utterances. In dialogic interaction, humans generally make use of the rich set of resources provided (but also subject to constraints) by the environment and the interaction partners. Since social robots have similar characteristics to human interaction partners, they need to be able to handle phenomena that are natural to human interaction. In his talk, Dr. Buschmeier will motivate and discuss a number of such phenomena relevant to human-robot interaction: spontaneous speech, turn-taking, miscommunication and repair, multimodal repair signals, and high-level social norms such as politeness.

Link: http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~hbuschme/

Short Bio

Hendrik Buschmeier is Professor of Digital Linguistics at Bielefeld University and works on computational models of dialogue phenomena and multimodal situated conversational interaction, both from a theoretical perspective and applied to human-agent interaction. He studied computer science with a focus on natural language processing and human-computer interaction at Bielefeld University and KTH Stockholm, and received his PhD in Intelligent Systems from the Center of Excellence in Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University.

Papers relevant for the talk

1. Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2018). Communicative listener feedback in human–agent interaction: Artificial speakers need to be attentive and adaptive. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1213–1221. https://doi.org/10.5555/3237383.3237880

2. Lumer, E., & Buschmeier, H. (2022). Perception of power and distance in human-human and human-robot rolebased relations. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 895–899. https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889308

3. Marge, M. et al. (2022). Spoken language interaction with robots: Recommendations for future research. Computer Speech & Language, 71, 101255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2021.101255

The lecture will be held in English and is aimed at students and staff of the H-BRS. Interested parties are cordially invited.