Koji Inoue

We demonstrate dialogues with an autonomous android ERICA, who has an appearance like a human being. Currently, ERICA plays two social roles: a laboratory guide and a counselor. It is designed to follow the protocols of human dialogue to make the user comfortable: (1) having a chat before the main talk, (2) proactively asking questions, and (3) conveying proper feedbacks. The combination of the human-like appearance and the appropriate behaviors according to her social roles allows for symbiotic

We describe an attentive listening system for the autonomous android robot ERICA. The proposed system generates several types of listener responses: backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, assessments, generic sentimental responses, and generic responses. In this paper, we report a subjective experiment with 20 elderly people. First, we evaluated each system utterance excluding backchannels and generic responses, in an offline manner. It was found that most of the system utterances were li

This paper proposes a decision making system and its process of the evolution. By evolving, this system comes to decide its action as if it has an emotion. According to the URGE theory asserted by Masanao Toda (1993), emotion is the most optimized and fundamental decision making system. If it is possible to generate such a system artificially, it may be applied in various engineering fields. Conventional decision making systems never have such an emotional nature. Thus, we started the research o

A job interview is a domain that takes advantage of an android robot's human-like appearance and behaviors. In this work, our goal is to implement a system in which an android plays the role of an interviewer so that users may practice for a real job interview. Our proposed system generates elaborate follow-up questions based on responses from the interviewee. We conducted an interactive experiment to compare the proposed system against a baseline system that asked only fixed-form questions. We

Spoken dialogue systems must be able to express empathy to achieve natural interaction with human users. However, laughter generation requires a high level of dialogue understanding. Thus, implementing laughter in existing systems, such as in conversational robots, has been challenging. As a first step toward solving this problem, rather than generating laughter from user dialogue, we focus on "shared laughter," where a user laughs using either solo or speech laughs (initial laugh), and the syst

koji inoue, divesh

We have investigated the aging behavior of quenched-in vacancies in excess Si type Al–Mg–Si-alloys by coincidence Doppler broadening of positron annihilation radiation and positron lifetime spectroscopy. The chemical composition around the quenched-in vacancies is initially rich in Si. For aging at both 50°C and 100°C, the Mg/Si composition ratio around the vacancies increases with aging time. The final Mg/Si composition ratio around the vacancies was found to be almost the same for aging at bot

Many people are now engaged in remote conversations for a wide variety of scenes such as interviewing, counseling, and consulting, but there is a limited number of skilled experts. We propose a novel framework of parallel conversations with semi-autonomous avatars, where one operator collaborates with several remote robots or agents simultaneously. The autonomous dialogue system mostly manages the conversation, but switches to the human operator when necessary. This framework circumvents the req

We address the annotation of engagement in the context of human-machine interaction. Engagement represents the level of how much a user is being interested in and willing to continue the current interaction. The conversational data used in the annotation work is a human-robot interaction corpus where a human subject talks with the android ERICA, which is remotely operated by another human subject. The annotation work was done by multiple third-party annotators, and the task was to detect the tim

The Specifications of the Digital Cinema system released by Digital Cinema Initiatives decide to encode so-called 2K or 4K images by JPEG 2000. The JPEG 2000 codec provides high compression rates and error tolerance, but this codec is burden for both encoding and decoding. The parallel computing architecture named CUDA receives a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we attempt to realize real-time implementation of the two dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) of JPEG 2000 by usin

An attentive listening system for autonomous android ERICA is presented. Our goal is to realize a humanlike natural attentive listener for elderly people. The proposed system generates listener responses: backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, assessments, and generic responses. The system incorporates speech processing using a microphone array and real-time dialogue processing including continuous backchannel prediction and turn-taking prediction. In this study, we conducted a dialogue e