Keynote Speaker: Dr Mary Ellen Foster, Senior Lecturer in HRI at the University of Glasgow
Title: Face-to-face Conversation With Socially Intelligent Robots
Abstract: When humans talk to each other face-to-face, theyuse their voices, faces, andbodies together in a rich, multimodal, continuous, interactive process. For a robot to participate fully in this sort of natural, face-to-face conversation in the real world, it must also be able not only to understand the social signals of its human partners, but also to produce appropriate signals in response. I will present recent research in this area, and will also discuss the emerging ethical implications of real-world deployment of socially intelligent robots.
Biography: Dr Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are human-robot interaction, social robotics, and embodied conversational agents. She recently coordinated the MuMMER project, a European Horizon 2020 project in the area of socially aware human-robot interaction, and is currently coordinatinga UK/Canada collaborative project investigating the use of socially intelligent robots in paediatric emergency rooms. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2007, and has previously worked at the Technical University of Munichand Heriot-Watt University. Her homepage is http://maryellenfoster.uk.