Joint attention has been shown to be not only crucial for human-human interaction but also human-robot interaction. Joint attention can help to make cooperation more efficient, support disambiguation in instances of uncertainty and make interactions appear more natural and familiar. In this paper, we present an autonomous gaze system that uses multimodal perception capabilities to model responsive joint attention mechanisms. We investigate the effects of our system on people’s perception of a robot within a problem-solving task. Results from a user study suggest that responsive joint attention mechanisms evoke higher perceived feelings of social presence on scales that regard the direction of the robot’s perception.

In this paper we present a corpus of multiparty situated interaction where participants collaborated on moving virtual objects on a large touch screen. A moderator facilitated the discussion and directed the interaction. The corpus contains recordings of a variety of multimodal data, in that we captured speech, eye gaze and gesture data using a multisensory setup (wearable eye trackers, motion capture and audio/video). Furthermore, in the description of the multimodal corpus, we investigate four different types of social gaze: referential gaze, joint attention, mutual gaze and gaze aversion by both perspectives of a speaker and a listener. We annotated the groups’ object references during object manipulation tasks and analysed the group’s proportional referential eye-gaze with regards to the referent object. When investigating the distributions of gaze during and before referring expressions we could corroborate the differences in time between speakers’ and listeners’ eye gaze found in earlier studies. This corpus is of particular interest to researchers who are interested in social eye-gaze patterns in turn-taking and referring language in situated multi-party interaction.

In recent years, more and more multimodal corpora have been created. To our knowledge there is no publicly available tool which allows for acquiring controlled multimodal data of people in a rapid and scalable fashion. We therefore are proposing (1) a novel tool which will enable researchers to rapidly gather large amounts of multimodal data spanning a wide demographic range, and (2) an example of how we used this tool for corpus collection of our "Attentive listener'' multimodal corpus. The code is released under an Apache License 2.0 and available as an open-source repository, which can be found at https://github.com/kth-social-robotics/multimodal-crowdsourcing-tool. This tool will allow researchers to set-up their own multimodal data collection system quickly and create their own multimodal corpora. Finally, this paper provides a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages with a crowd-sourced data collection tool, especially in comparison to a lab recorded corpora.

In this paper we present (1) a processing architecture used to collect multi-modal sensor data, both for corpora collection and real-time processing, (2) an open-source implementation thereof and (3) a use-case where we deploy the architecture in a multi-party deception game, featuring six human players and one robot. The architecture is agnostic to the choice of hardware (e.g. microphones, cameras, etc.) and programming languages, although our implementation is mostly written in Python. In our use-case, different methods of capturing verbal and non-verbal cues from the participants were used. These were processed in real-time and used to inform the robot about the participants’ deceptive behaviour. The framework is of particular interest for researchers who are interested in the collection of multi-party, richly recorded corpora and the design of conversational systems. Moreover for researchers who are interested in human-robot interaction the available modules offer the possibility to easily create both autonomous and wizard-of-Oz interactions.

This demo presents a web-based system that generates attentive listening behaviours in a virtual agent acquired from audio-visual recordings of attitudinal feedback behaviour of crowdworkers.

Feedback generation is an important component of humanhuman communication. Humans can choose to signal support, understanding, agreement or also sceptiscism by means of feedback tokens. Many studies have focused on the timing of feedback behaviours. In the current study, however, we keep the timing constant and instead focus on the lexical form and prosody of feedback tokens as well as their sequential patterns. For this we crowdsourced participant's feedback behaviour in identical interactional contexts in order to model a virtual agent that is able to provide feedback as an attentive/supportive as well as attentive/sceptical listener. The resulting models were realised in a robot which was evaluated by third-party observers.

In this paper we are describing how audio-visual corpora recordings using crowd-sourcing techniques can be used for the audio-visual synthesis of attitudinal non-verbal feedback expressions for virtual agents. We are discussing the limitations of this approach as well as where we see the opportunities for this technology.

In this study, we are using a multi-party recording as a template for building a parametric speech synthesiser which is able to express different levels of attentiveness in backchannel tokens. This allowed us to investigate i) whether it is possible to express the same perceived level of attentiveness in synthesised than in natural backchannels; ii) whether it is possible to increase and decrease the perceived level of attentiveness of backchannels beyond the range observed in the original corpus.