CML Colloquium: Learning Robots for Social Therapies

28 September 2016

CML Colloquium 28 September 2016, 10:00, Konrad-Zuse Hörsaal, Informatikum.

Emilia I. Barakova, Eindhoven University of Technology:
Learning Robots for Social Therapies

Abstract: Recent developments in robotics promise an attractive solution for emerging societal problems as growing ageing population, rising health costs, and shortages in medical and special-needs care. A crucial gap that still needs to be filled before healthcare robots are integrated in real-world settings is that they must ultimately be accepted by humans in the human social sphere. An essential factor playing a role in robot acceptance is the ability of robots to react appropriately to human social signals and have grounded social and emotional behavior. Learning is a basic mechanism for grounding social behavior on multiple levels. Robot´s constitutive, interactive and societal autonomy require various learning mechanisms and coping strategies such as: (1) recognition and joint manipulation of objects by using models of hands interplay and dominance, (2) using predictive mechanisms in interactive behaviors, (3) developing social strategies for long-term interaction based on game-theoretical approaches and methods from evolutionary computing and (4) using social computing for personalization and development of training scenarios. Finally, the trade-offs of implementing learning behaviors or alternative approaches will be discussed.

Bio: Emilia I. Barakova received the Master's degree in electronics and automation from the Technical University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics and physics from Groningen University, The Netherlands, in 1999. She has a background in Artificial intelligence (Groningen University), Behavioral robotics (GMD-Japan research laboratory), Brain-inspired robotics (RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan), and Social signal processing, social robotics and user-centered interaction design (Eindhoven University of Technology). She is currently with the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Her recent research is on modeling social and emotional behavior for applications to social robotics and robots for social training of autistic children. Barakova is an Editor of Personal and Ubiquitous computing journal and Journal of Integrative Neuroscience.