kth.sePublications
Change search
Link to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Publications (10 of 12) Show all publications
Elgarf, M., Calvo-Barajas, N., Alves-Oliveira, P., Perugia, G., Castellano, G., Peters, C. & Paiva, A. (2022). "And then what happens?" Promoting Children’s Verbal Creativity Using a Robot. In: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction: . Paper presented at HRI '22: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Sapporo Hokkaido Japan March 7 - 10, 2022 (pp. 71-79). ACM Digital Library
Open this publication in new window or tab >>"And then what happens?" Promoting Children’s Verbal Creativity Using a Robot
Show others...
2022 (English)In: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, ACM Digital Library, 2022, p. 71-79Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

While creativity has been previously studied in Child-Robot interaction, the effect of regulatory focus on creativity skills has not been investigated. This paper presents an exploratory study that, for the first time, uses the Regulatory Focus Theory to assess children's creativity skills in an educational context with a social robot. We investigated whether two key emotional regulation techniques, promotion (approach) and prevention (avoidance), stimulate creativity during a storytelling activity between a child and a robot. We conducted a between-subjects field study with 69 children between the ages of 7 and 9 years old, divided between two study conditions: (1) promotion, where a social robot primes children for action by eliciting positive emotional states, and (2) prevention, where a social robot primes children for avoidance by evoking a states related to security and safety associated with blockage-oriented behaviors. To assess changes in creativity as a response to the priming interaction, children were asked to tell stories to the robot before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the priming interaction. We measured creativity levels by analyzing the verbal content of the stories. We coded verbal expressions related to creativity variables, including fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality. Our results show that children in the promotion condition generated significantly more ideas, and their ideas were on average more original in the stories they created in the post-test rather than in the pre-test. We also modeled the process of creativity that emerges during storytelling in response to the robot's verbal behavior. This paper enriches the scientific understanding of creativity emergence in child-robot collaborative interactions.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
ACM Digital Library, 2022
Series
ACM IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, ISSN 2167-2121
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-317487 (URN)10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889408 (DOI)000869793600011 ()2-s2.0-85138678895 (Scopus ID)
Conference
HRI '22: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Sapporo Hokkaido Japan March 7 - 10, 2022
Note

Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-1-6654-0731-1

QC 20220913

Available from: 2022-09-12 Created: 2022-09-12 Last updated: 2023-02-10Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M. (2022). Child-Robot Behavioral Alignment and Creativity Performance. (Doctoral dissertation). KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Child-Robot Behavioral Alignment and Creativity Performance
2022 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In recent years, robots have been prevalent in almost all domains. One of the most common applications of social robotics is for education with children. This dissertation addresses the integration of creativity-related education in child-robot interactions. Creativity is a required skill in the 21st century. It is regarded by many researchers as an essential survival skill. It has been established that current educational methods limit children's freedom of expression and therefore, negatively impact their creative abilities. To date, a few research attempts have focused on developing social child-robot interactions to foster children's creativity. 

In this work, methods were investigated to boost children's creativity skills through social interactions with a robot in a storytelling context. To define and evaluate creativity, standard four creativity measures were used throughout the thesis: fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality. 

First, a social activity was developed to be performed between a social robot and a child. The activity comprises of two games: an interactive priming game and a storytelling game. The activity has been used throughout the thesis to evaluate implemented algorithms and methods. Second, 3 field studies were conducted with 210 school-aged children (5-10 years old). In these studies, the developed activity was used and notions of emotional alignment and creativity alignment between a child and a social robot were examined. In the context of this work, the concept of behavioral alignment refers to the synchronisation between the robot and the child that results in the child mirroring the robot. Emotional alignment occurs when a child mirrors the robot's emotions. Whereas, creativity alignment results in the child behaving creatively as an effect of interacting with a creative robot. Through the conducted studies, the effects of the various types of child-robot behavioral alignment on children's emotional states, engagement with the robot and children's creativity skills were investigated. Third, a computational model that enables a conversational agent to collaboratively interact with a child in a storytelling activity in a creative manner was produced. The computational model was implemented to be used in an integrated manner with the software interface of the storytelling game. The data collected in the first two studies was used to train the computational model that was assessed through the third and last study.

The findings highlight the effectiveness of social robots in promoting children's creativity skills. They emphasize the potential of the developed educational application (storytelling game interface + computational model) in improving children's creative abilities. This work enriches the literature with new insights on developing robot's behaviors that benefit children's creative processes and therefore, is significant to the child-robot interaction (cHRI) community.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2022. p. 93
Series
TRITA-EECS-AVL ; 2022:50
National Category
Information Systems
Research subject
Information and Communication Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-317490 (URN)978-91-8040-315-3 (ISBN)
Public defence
2022-10-05, VIC-studion, Lindstedtsvägen 5, plan 4, KTH Campus, Stockholm, 13:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Note

QC 20220913

Available from: 2022-09-13 Created: 2022-09-12 Last updated: 2022-10-04Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M. & Peters, C. (2022). CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller Agent Developed by Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models. In: 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS): . Paper presented at International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller Agent Developed by Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models
2022 (English)In: 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2022Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

In an attempt to nurture children's creativity, we developed a creative conversational agent to be used in a collaborative storytelling context with a child. We presented a novel approach to develop creative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our approach uses the four creativity measures: fluency, flexi-bility, elaboration and originality in order to generate creative behavior. We analyzed and annotated our previously collected storytelling data sets -collected with children- according to our four creativity measures. We then used the extracted and annotated data (636 statements) in order to fine-tune two pre-trained language models (Open AI GPT-3). The two models were aimed at generating creative versus non-creative behavior in a collaborative storytelling scenario. We developed the two models to be able to assess the results and compare them together. We conducted an evaluation to assess stories generated collaboratively between a human and both agents separately (n = 26). Adult Users rated the creativity of the agent according to the stories generated. Results showed that the creative agent was perceived as significantly more creative than the non-creative agent. With the experiment results confirming the validity of our system, we may therefore proceed with testing the effects of the creative behavior of the agent on children's creativity skills.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2022
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-317488 (URN)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981033 (DOI)000909405304075 ()2-s2.0-105004660674 (Scopus ID)
Conference
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Note

QC 20230322

Available from: 2022-09-12 Created: 2022-09-12 Last updated: 2025-05-21Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M., Zojaji, S., Skantze, G. & Peters, C. (2022). CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller robot to stimulate creativity in children. In: ICMI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction: . Paper presented at 24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2022, Bangalore, India, 7-11 November 2022 (pp. 540-548). Association for Computing Machinery
Open this publication in new window or tab >>CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller robot to stimulate creativity in children
2022 (English)In: ICMI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery , 2022, p. 540-548Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

We present the design and evaluation of a storytelling activity between children and an autonomous robot aiming at nurturing children's creativity. We assessed whether a robot displaying creative behavior will positively impact children's creativity skills in a storytelling context. We developed two models for the robot to engage in the storytelling activity: creative model, where the robot generates creative story ideas, and the non-creative model, where the robot generates non-creative story ideas. We also investigated whether the type of the storytelling interaction will have an impact on children's creativity skills. We used two types of interaction: 1) Collaborative, where the child and the robot collaborate together by taking turns to tell a story. 2) Non-collaborative: where the robot first tells a story to the child and then asks the child to tell it another story. We conducted a between-subjects study with 103 children in four different conditions: Creative collaborative, Non-creative collaborative, Creative non-collaborative and Non-Creative non-collaborative. The children's stories were evaluated according to the four standard creativity variables: fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality. Results emphasized that children who interacted with a creative robot showed higher creativity during the interaction than children who interacted with a non-creative robot. Nevertheless, no significant effect of the type of the interaction was found on children's creativity skills. Our findings are significant to the Child-Robot interaction (cHRI) community since they enrich the scientific understanding of the development of child-robot encounters for educational applications.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery, 2022
Keywords
child-robot interaction, creativity, education, human-robot interaction, social robots, storytelling
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-317489 (URN)10.1145/3536221.3556578 (DOI)001074464500059 ()2-s2.0-85142861179 (Scopus ID)
Conference
24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2022, Bangalore, India, 7-11 November 2022
Note

QC 20230626

Available from: 2022-09-12 Created: 2022-09-12 Last updated: 2023-11-10Bibliographically approved
Calvo-Barajas, N., Elgarf, M., Perugia, G., Paiva, A., Peters, C. & Castellano, G. (2021). Hurry Up, We Need to Find the Key! How Regulatory Focus Design Affects Children's Trust in a Social Robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 8, Article ID 652035.
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Hurry Up, We Need to Find the Key! How Regulatory Focus Design Affects Children's Trust in a Social Robot
Show others...
2021 (English)In: Frontiers in Robotics and AI, E-ISSN 2296-9144, Vol. 8, article id 652035Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In educational scenarios involving social robots, understanding the way robot behaviors affect children's motivation to achieve their learning goals is of vital importance. It is crucial for the formation of a trust relationship between the child and the robot so that the robot can effectively fulfill its role as a learning companion. In this study, we investigate the effect of a regulatory focus design scenario on the way children interact with a social robot. Regulatory focus theory is a type of self-regulation that involves specific strategies in pursuit of goals. It provides insights into how a person achieves a particular goal, either through a strategy focused on "promotion" that aims to achieve positive outcomes or through one focused on "prevention" that aims to avoid negative outcomes. In a user study, 69 children (7-9 years old) played a regulatory focus design goal-oriented collaborative game with the EMYS robot. We assessed children's perception of likability and competence and their trust in the robot, as well as their willingness to follow the robot's suggestions when pursuing a goal. Results showed that children perceived the prevention-focused robot as being more likable than the promotion-focused robot. We observed that a regulatory focus design did not directly affect trust. However, the perception of likability and competence was positively correlated with children's trust but negatively correlated with children's acceptance of the robot's suggestions.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Frontiers Media SA, 2021
Keywords
trust, child-robot interaction, regulatory focus, goal orientation, affective, emotional robot
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-299494 (URN)10.3389/frobt.2021.652035 (DOI)000675557600001 ()34307468 (PubMedID)2-s2.0-85111265509 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20210811

Available from: 2021-08-11 Created: 2021-08-11 Last updated: 2022-06-25Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M., Skantze, G. & Peters, C. (2021). Once Upon a Story: Can a Creative Storyteller Robot Stimulate Creativity in Children?. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on intelligent virtual agents (IVA): . Paper presented at 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), SEP 14-17, 2021, ELECTR NETWORK (pp. 60-67). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Once Upon a Story: Can a Creative Storyteller Robot Stimulate Creativity in Children?
2021 (English)In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on intelligent virtual agents (IVA), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2021, p. 60-67Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Creativity is a vital inherent human trait. In an attempt to stimulate children's creativity, we present the design and evaluation of an interaction between a child and a social robot in a storytelling context. Using a software interface, children were asked to collaboratively create a story with the robot. We conducted a study with 38 children in two conditions. In one condition, the children interacted with a robot exhibiting creative behavior while in the other condition, they interacted with a robot exhibiting non creative behavior. The robot's creativity was defined as verbal and performance creativity. The robot's creative and non creative behaviors were extracted from a previously collected data set and were validated in an online survey with 100 participants. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, children's creativity measures were not higher in the creative condition than in the non creative condition. Our results suggest that merely the robot's creative behavior is insufficient to stimulate creativity in children in a child robot interaction. We further discuss other design factors that may facilitate sparking creativity in children in similar settings in the future.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021
Keywords
Creativity, social agents, social robotics, human robot interaction, storytelling
National Category
Robotics and automation Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-306988 (URN)10.1145/3472306.3478359 (DOI)000728149900009 ()2-s2.0-85115788932 (Scopus ID)
Conference
21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), SEP 14-17, 2021, ELECTR NETWORK
Note

QC 20220120

Part of proceedings ISBN 978-1-4503-8619-7 ; 9781450386197

Available from: 2022-01-20 Created: 2022-01-20 Last updated: 2025-02-05Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M., Calvo-Barajas, N. & Paiva, A. (2021). Reward seeking or loss aversion?: impact of regulatory focus theory on emotional induction in children and their behavior towards a. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings: . Paper presented at 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI 2021, 8-13 May 2021. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Reward seeking or loss aversion?: impact of regulatory focus theory on emotional induction in children and their behavior towards a
2021 (English)In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2021Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

According to psychology research, emotional induction has positive implications in many domains such as therapy and education. Our aim in this paper was to manipulate the Regulatory Focus Theory to assess its impact on the induction of regulatory focus related emotions in children in a pretend play scenario with a social robot. The Regulatory Focus Theory suggests that people follow one of two paradigms while attempting to achieve a goal; by seeking gains (promotion focus - associated with feelings of happiness) or by avoiding losses (prevention focus - associated with feelings of fear).We conducted a study with 69 school children in two different conditions (promotion vs. prevention). We succeeded in inducing happiness emotions in the promotion condition and found a resulting positive effect of the induction on children's social engagement with the robot. We also discuss the important implications of these results in both educational and child robot interaction fields. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021
Keywords
Emotional induction, Human robot interaction, Regulatory focus, Social engagement, Social robotics, Computation theory, Economic and social effects, Educational robots, Human engineering, Child-robot interactions, Loss aversion, Social robots
National Category
Human Computer Interaction Robotics and automation
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-309635 (URN)10.1145/3411764.3445486 (DOI)2-s2.0-85106713221 (Scopus ID)
Conference
2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI 2021, 8-13 May 2021
Note

Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-1-4503-8096-6

QC 20220309

Available from: 2022-03-09 Created: 2022-03-09 Last updated: 2025-02-05Bibliographically approved
Calvo, N., Elgarf, M., Perugia, G., Peters, C. & Castellano, G. (2020). Can a social robot be persuasive without losing children's trust?. In: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI 2020: . Paper presented at 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction, HRI 2020, 23 March 2020 through 26 March 2020 (pp. 157-159). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Can a social robot be persuasive without losing children's trust?
Show others...
2020 (English)In: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI 2020, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2020, p. 157-159Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Social robots can be used to motivate children to engage in learning activities in education. In such contexts, they might need to persuade children to achieve specific learning goals. We conducted an exploratory study with 42 children in a museum setting. Children were asked to play an interactive storytelling game on a touchscreen. A Furhat robot guided them through the steps of creating the character of a story in two conditions. In one condition, the robot tried to influence children's choices using high-controlling language. In the other, the robot left children free to choose and used a low-controlling language. Participants in the persuasive condition generally followed the indications of the robot. Interestingly, the use of high-controlling language did not affect children's perceived trust towards the robot. We discuss the important implications that these results may have when designing children-robot interactions.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2020
Keywords
Human-robot interaction, Persuasion, Reactance, Trust, Agricultural robots, Man machine systems, Children robot interactions, Exploratory studies, Interactive storytelling, Learning Activity, Perceived trusts, Specific learning, Social robots
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-277269 (URN)10.1145/3371382.3378272 (DOI)000643728500047 ()2-s2.0-85083262452 (Scopus ID)
Conference
15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction, HRI 2020, 23 March 2020 through 26 March 2020
Note

QC 20210608

Available from: 2020-06-26 Created: 2020-06-26 Last updated: 2023-03-30Bibliographically approved
Galal-Edeen, G. H., Abdrabou, Y., Elgarf, M. & Hassan, H. M. (2019). HCI of Arabia: The challenges of HCI research in Egypt. interactions, 26(3), 55-59
Open this publication in new window or tab >>HCI of Arabia: The challenges of HCI research in Egypt
2019 (English)In: interactions, ISSN 1072-5520, E-ISSN 1558-3449, Vol. 26, no 3, p. 55-59Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2019
National Category
Other Engineering and Technologies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-251821 (URN)10.1145/3318215 (DOI)2-s2.0-85065138341 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20190529

Available from: 2019-05-29 Created: 2019-05-29 Last updated: 2025-02-18Bibliographically approved
Elgarf, M. & Peters, C. (2019). Rock your story: Effects of adapting personality behavior through body movement on story recall. In: HAI 2019 - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction: . Paper presented at 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, HAI 2019; Musubiwaza-kan of Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto; Japan; 6 October 2019 through 10 October 2019; (pp. 241-243). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Rock your story: Effects of adapting personality behavior through body movement on story recall
2019 (English)In: HAI 2019 - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2019, p. 241-243Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

In order to design social agents for long term interactions, it is important to enable them to adapt to the users. In this paper, we chose personality as a medium for adaptation. We conducted a study with 20 participants who watched a story presented by a virtual character in one of two conditions: extroverted or introverted. The study aimed at assessing the impacts of matching the personality of the user with the virtual character through body language on the likability of the character and the information recall of the story. Our findings do not appear to coincide with theoretical expectations since the extroverted character had higher ratings of likability regardless of the personality of the user. Results have also shown a marginal positive effect of the encounter with the introverted character in terms of memory recall. We discuss the important implications that these results may have in the future for human agent interaction design.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2019
Keywords
Adaptation, Body movement, Personality, Similarity, Social agents
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-266869 (URN)10.1145/3349537.3352779 (DOI)000719339300043 ()2-s2.0-85077134817 (Scopus ID)
Conference
7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, HAI 2019; Musubiwaza-kan of Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto; Japan; 6 October 2019 through 10 October 2019;
Note

QC 20200124

Part of ISBN 9781450369220

Available from: 2020-01-24 Created: 2020-01-24 Last updated: 2024-10-21Bibliographically approved
Organisations
Identifiers
ORCID iD: ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0003-0340-3860

Search in DiVA

Show all publications