PROJECTS
HUMOR IN HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION
Project "AGENTS: Generation of Humor for Social Robots" and Raquel Oliveira's PhD thesis on using humor to enhance positive interactions with social robots
REFERENCE: CMU/TIC/0055/2019
YEARS: 2019-2022
The AGENTS project was funded by FCT and is aligned with Raquel Oliveira's PhD project, also financed by FCT.
Both projects focus on the study of Humor in the context of human-robot interaction, and Raquel Oliveira played a central role in both the development of the two projects, implementation, and the writing of the associated publications.
Humor is an important feature in human communication and is an essential and ubiquitous feature of everyday life. Humor has been linked to numerous positive outcomes.
GOALS:
The AGENTS project will leverage the power of humor to create more naturalistic and lifelike interactions with socially embodied agents, in particular, social robots.
The positive effect of humor can be increased through the delivery of user-personalized humor in naturalistic settings. In AGENTS, psychological models of humor and its’ everyday functions will be of use when attempting to create a top-down approach of humor that can be modeled to match each user’s preferences, fostering more natural and positive interactions with users. The end-goal of this process will be the implementation of user personalized humoristic interactions in the context of a multi-party interaction scenario with a card game involving more than one human and more than one robot. This is expected to lead to better interaction outcomes and increase the value perception of the robot, by contributing to greater user’s task enjoyment, engagement, and positive emotions.
RESEARCHERS IN THE AGENTS PROJECT
Ana Paiva (PI; INESC-ID, IST-UL); Patrícia Arriaga (CO-PI, Iscte-IUL), Louis-Philippe Morency (Carnegie Mellon University)
Raquel Oliveira, Rui Prada (INESC-ID, IST-UL), João Barreiros, Sofia Batinha
RAQUEL OLIVEIRA
SUPERVISORS OF RAQUEL OLIVEIRA PhD THESIS
Patrícia Arriaga (CO-PI, Iscte-IUL)
Ana Paiva (PI; INESC-ID, IST-UL)
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
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Humor-Robot Interaction: A Scoping review of the literature and future directions. International Journal of Social Robotics, 13, 1369–1383. LINK
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A systematic review of the effects of laughter on blood pressure and heart rate variability. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. LINK
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The role of humor in social, psychological, and physical well-being. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. LINK
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Empathy and prosociality in social agents. In B. Lugrin, C. Pelachaud, & D. Taum (Eds), The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents (Vol.1, pp. 385-431). ACM. LINK
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Towards prosocial design: A systematic review of the use of robots and virtual agents on prosocial behaviour. Computers in Human Behavior, 114, 106547.
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Human-robot interaction in groups: Methodological and research practices. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 5, 59.