Modeling Emotion, Behavior and Context in Socially Believable Robots and ICT Interfaces

Anna Esposito 0 1 2 Leopoldina Fortunati 0 1 2 Giuseppe Lugano 0 1 2 0 G. Lugano COST Association, Avenue Louise 149, 1050 Brussels, Belgium 1 L. Fortunati Department of Human Sciences, Universita` di Udine , Udine, Italy 2 A. Esposito (&) Department of Psychology and IIASS, Seconda Universita` di Napoli , Caserta, Italy - The modeling and implementation of sophisticated multimodal software/hardware interfaces is a current scientific challenge of high societal relevance. The main characteristics entailed by these interfaces are being able to interact with people, inferring social, organizational and physical contexts based on sensed data, assisting people with special needs, enhancing elderly health-care assistance, learning and rehabilitation in daily functional activities. Implementing such Human Computer Interaction (HCI) systems is of public utility and profitable for a living science that should simplify users accesses to a wide range of social services, either remotely or in a person-to-person setting. The current and future applications foreseen in this highly interdisciplinary field are countless: among these are featured context-aware avatars and robotic devices replacing and/or acting on behalf of humans in high responsibility tasks or time-critical dangerous tasks such as urban emergencies. Other emerging applications concern robot companions for elderly and vulnerable people and intelligent agents for services where there is a shortage of suitable skills or otherwise there is a request of significant investments in training-qualified personnel such as in therapist-based interventions. Given the complexities required by these automated tasks, the approach for developing such devices has to account for a holistic investigation perspective. New cognitive architectures must be foreseen and new cognitive integrations must be exploited in order to take advantage of the knowledge derived from the analysis of human behaviors across different contexts. At the stake, there is the need to develop a deep understanding of the emotional and intentional cognitive processes underpinning human interactions. Inherently new insights must be deployed for designing complexautonomous systems, which are required to be able to feel human emotional and intentional states; cooperatively adapt to them through a socially ethical and sensible conduct; and exhibit coherent vocal, visual and gestural affordances. The present Special Issue investigates these topics, by gathering new experimental data and theories across a spectrum of disciplines, in order to identify the metastructures underlying these phenomena. This effort hopefully will stimulate, on the one hand, the conception of new mathematical models for representing data, reasoning and learning. On the other hand, it will produce new psychological and computational approaches with respect to the existing cognitive frameworks and algorithmic solutions. Enabling a consistent progress toward the implementation of a human automaton level of intelligence is crucial for developing such HCI systems and enhancing the quality of life of people addressing their current and future societal needs. The topics proposed by the present special issue are interdisciplinary and cover issues related to several areas of research. Let us report them: behavioral analysis of interactions; mathematical models for representing data, reasoning and learning; social signal and context effects; algorithmic solutions for socially believable robots and ICT interfaces; human and/or machine encoding/decoding of affective behavioral patterns; psychological and computational approaches to behavioral analyses; case studies for the analysis and identification of personality traits, affective wellbeing and emotional states; social robotics; and ICT interfaces for supporting education, wellbeing and empathy. The idea to dedicate a special issue of Cognitive Computation to cover the interdisciplinary aspects of human human and humanmachine interactions was prompted by our desire to elicit new guidance in the quest for the implementation of emotionally and socially believable robot and ICT interfaces. First, we aimed to initiate a discussion on what has been achieved to date and has currently been made available to end users. Second, we intended to focus on which needs have been fostered by the use of prototypical applications and what has been missed so far. The special issue is an outcome of the COST Strategic Workshop The future concept and reality of social robotics: challenges, perception and applications. Role of social robotics in current and future society,1 held in Brussels (Belgium), from the 10 to the 13 of June, 2013. COST is one of the longest-running European framework supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe and oversea. Built on the key principles of supporting excellence, and being open and inclusive, COST allows the coordination of nationally funded research at a European level, strengthening Europes research and innovation capacities. By fostering new ideas and knowledge sharing, it aims to enable scientific breakthroughs leading to new theoretical concepts and products that will promote the European scientific excellence. The workshops main objectives were to develop an advanced comprehension of how everyday ICT uses and practices influence peoples interactional and intentional behaviors and affective displays, and entail forms of dynamic learning processes between people and devices where both entities are reciprocally affected and mobilized, where [technology] uses are the result of negotiations and clashes between technical affordances, commercial conditions and peoples intentions, aims, habits and obligations, and where non-intentional, as well as non-conscious aspects are involved [10]. On these premises, it clearly appears that new technological developments must develop a user-centered approach taking into account user expectations and requirements to qualify as user-friendly the socially believable ICT interfaces that provide social/physical/ psychological/assistive ICT services. 1 www.cost.eu/events/socialrobotics. In particular, the term social robotics envisions a natural interaction of such devices with humans, where natural is interpreted as the ability of such agents to enter the social and communicative space ordinarily occupied by living creatures. In this sense, a social information communication device should be able, as already mentioned, to combine and build up knowledge through verbal and nonverbal signals contextually enacted by exploiting an intuitive data processing that uncovers the wealth of information conveyed by humans during interactions. The fundamental questions that continue to remain open are those posed by Esposito et al. [6]: Which human behavioral patterns are entitled to provide features that, appropriately modeled, will raise machine intelligence to a level close to (...truncated)