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We are so proud to announce that Luís Sá-Couto successfully defended his thesis proposal on "Employing brain inspired principles towards better and more general learning of simple vision" supervised by Andreas Wichert.
The examiners were Mário Figueiredo and Rui Henriques.
Congratulations Luís!
#BrainInspiredModels #SparseCodes #WhatWhereCodes
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The paper "Helping People On The Fly: Ad Hoc Teamwork for Human-Robot Teams" by João Ribeiro, Alberto Sardinha and Francisco S. Melo just won the best paper award at EPIA 2021!! Congratulations to all the authors!
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We are so proud to announce that Diogo Rato successfully defended his thesis proposal on "Procedurally Generated Societies". Congratulations Diogo!
#NonPlayableCharacters #SocialCognition
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Tomorrow, Ana Paiva will be a keynote speaker at the TSAR workshop in ROMAN 2021. Her talk is on the topic "From social robotics to prosocial robotics: How robots can promote altruism" and it will be at 11:10 AM (EDT).
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Last Friday, Rui Prada was a keynote speaker at the ICIDM. His talk was about "How AI can help games fulfill their purpose", where Rui presented his work on the projects iv4XR and ID-Gaming.
You can check the slides of the presentation here.
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Our students Ana Antunes, Guilherme Varela, Inês Lobo, Inês Pereira, Isabel Neto and Pedro P. Santos got a PhD grant from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portuguese national funding). Congratulations!
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We are so proud to announce that Filipa Correia successfully defended her PhD thesis on "Group Intelligence in Social Robots".
Congratulations Filipa!
#humanrobotteamwork #humanrobotcollaboration #roboticteammates #hri
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Two of our members progressed in their faculty careers at Técnico: Francisco Santos was appointed as Full Professor of the CS Department, and Pedro Santos was appointed as Associate Professor of both the CS and the Math Departments. Congratulations!
More info here.
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We are so proud to announce that Miguel Vasco successfully defended his thesis proposal on "Multimodal Representation Learning for Agent Perception and Agency".
Congratulations Miguel!
#MultimodalRepresentations #RepresentationLearning #DeepReinforcementLearning #DeepRL
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We are so proud to announce that Guilherme Varela successfully defended his thesis proposal on "Coordination Mechanisms for Large Scale Reinforcement Learning based Adaptive Traffic Signal Control". Congratulations Guilherme!
#UrbanMobility #AdaptiveTrafficSignalControl #ReinforcementLearning
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Yesterday, Rui Prada gave a talk at Encontro Ciência'21 on Games for Quality Education.
The talk is in portuguese and you can watch it here.
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We are so proud to announce that our member Mojgan Hashemian successfully defended her PhD thesis on the topic "Persuasive Social Agents using Social Power Dynamics".
Congratulations Mojgan!
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We are so proud to announce that our member Sofia Petisca successfully defended her PhD thesis on the topic "Using social robots to encourage honest behaviours".
Congratulations Sofia!
#Dishonesty #UnethicalBehaviour #HumanRobotInteraction
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Rui Prada is giving a talk today (12:15 - 13:00 CET) at the #frAIday series of talks on artificial intelligence hosted by Umeå University.
To attend this talk you need to register here.
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O membro do GAIPS Pedro Santos, conjuntamente com M. Amélia Bastos e Cláudio Fernandes, acabaram de publicar um livro novo entitulado “Introdução às Álgebras de Operadores".
Este livro apresenta pela primeira vez em língua Portuguesa uma das mais importantes teorias matemáticas desenvolvidas ao longo do Séc. XX. As álgebras de operadores aparecem quando se tenta estender para dimensão infinita as habituais matrizes que surgem, por exemplo, quando se tenta resolver sistemas de equações lineares.
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The list of Excellent Professors at IST for the school year 2019/2020 has 9 GAIPS members!
Congratulations Anna Couto, Carlos Martinho, Francisco Melo, Francisco Santos, Alberto Sardinha, Luís Couto, Manuel Guimarães, Miguel Vasco, and Samuel Gomes!
#weAreTecnico #weAreGAIPS
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We are so proud to announce that our member Silvia Tulli successfully defended her thesis proposal today on the topic "Explainable Agency to Optimize Learning: An Inter-Agent Transfer Learning Approach for Artificial and Human Agents". Congratulations Silvia!
#ExplainableAI #SocialLearning #InterAgentTransferLearning
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We have two members, Ana Paiva and Francisco C. Santos, at the world ranking for computer science researchers by Guide2Research!! Congratulations to both!
More info here.
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Our member Francisco S. Melo gave a talk on "Foundations of Reinforcement Learning" at last week's Deep Learning Sessions Lisboa Meetup.
In case you missed it, it is now available on youtube.
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We are so proud to announce that Manuel Guimarães successfully defended his thesis proposal on the topic "Towards the next generation of Intelligent Virtual Agents: Combining Model-driven and Data-driven approaches". Congratulations Manuel!
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The Radcliffe Institute Fellows' Presentation hosted Ana Paiva talking about "Prosociality in Hybrid Societies of Humans, Agents, and Robots".
This talk is available online, you can check it here.
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CfP for Special Issue on Child-Robot Interaction: Design, Evaluation, and Novel Solutions
Deadline: July 15th
Guest editors: Marta Couto, Shruti Chandra, Elmira Yadollahi and Vicki Charisi
More information here.
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Pedro Santos presented his joint work with Diogo Carvalho & Francisco Melo about Two-time scale stochastic approximation for reinforcement learning with linear function approximation at the IST seminar series Mathematics, Physics & Machine Learning (MPML).
You can check the slides and the presentation here.
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Are you attending the Workshop on Children, Robots, and Virtual Agents at IDC 2021? The submission deadline is April 12th.
This workshop is organized by the our members Elmira Yadollahi, Marta Couto and Shruti Chandra (former member) together with Angelica Lim and Anara Sandygulova.
Check the website here.
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Our member Francisco Santos gave a talk at COMARL Seminars on the topic: Dynamics of cooperation in large-scale multi-agent systems. You can check it here.
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We are so proud to announce that Miguel Faria successfully defended his thesis proposal on "Improving Robots Communication Capabilities Using Expressive Movements in Multi-user Interactions". Congratulations Miguel!
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Congratulations Patrícia Oliveira, Patrícia Arriaga, Ana Paiva & Guy Hoffman for the Best Paper Award on the Design category!
Check out Patrícia's presentation about the paper here.
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We are so proud to announce that Maria José Ferreira successfully defended her thesis proposal on "Learn biodiversity using local stories to power up storytelling behaviours in social robots". Congratulations Maria!
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We are so proud to announce that our member Filipa Correia was nominated for Best PhD Student in the INESC-ID Awards 2020 symbolic ceremony that took place yesterday, online, during the 20th Scientific Council Plenary Meeting. Congratulations Filipa!
Check here all the winners and nominees.
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Our members Andreas Wichert & Luís Sá-Couto have just published a new book "Machine Learning - A Journey to Deep Learning" at World Scientific.
The useful reference text represents a solid foundation in machine learning and should prepare readers to apply and understand machine learning algorithms as well as to invent new machine learning methods. It tells a story outgoing from a perceptron to deep learning highlighted with concrete examples, including exercises and answers for the students.
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SAPO suggested 7 activities to entertain the youngest on each day of this new week of confinement. For today they mention Treme-Treme, a game developed by a team of researchers from GAIPS, that teaches children about #SeismicRisk in a fun way.
Check the full article here.
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Congratulations to Ana Paiva and Francisco Santos for being among the most cited top scientists in their research areas! This list was compiled by Stanford University with 385 scientists affiliated to several national institutions. The rankings are based upon a researcher's citations for both a single year (2019) and cumulative across their careers.
More info here.
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Isabel Neto gave a talk on "Can social robots be part of Diversity & Inclusion?". This was the first of a circle of sessions about D&I hosted by Lean In Portugal.
You can watch it (in portuguese) here.
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Last week, our member João Ribeiro gave a talk at Nova School of Business and Economics on "Demystifying Deep Learning". It was part of the programming academy event organized by Pedro Souto.
You may check the slides here.
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Our amazing team got together for a new year's meet-up and also to show the gifts from Secret Santa (Remote Edition). We are now ready to embrace a wonderful year full of scientific achievements!
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Today is the European Researchers Night until 22h. GAIPS Lab will have a video "Emotional and Intelligent Agents for Testing Games and Simulations" (project iv4XR) in the "Videos about Current Projects" session and also a demo of "Treme-Treme" in the "Games, Apps & Challenges" session.
You can access this online event here.
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Our member Rui Prada talked about his work at "90 Segundos de Ciência" show, focusing on the recent H2020 project iv4XR.
You can listen (in portuguese) here.
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The GAIPS members Silvia Tulli, Marta Couto, Miguel Vasco, Elmira Yadollahi, Francisco Melo and Ana Paiva won the Best Student Paper Award at ICSR 2020!
Congratulations!
Check the paper here.
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Our members Elmira Yadollahi, Marta Couto and former member Shruti Chandra are organizing the ICSR 2020 workshop on Child-Robot Interaction that will happen tomorrow!
The keynote speakers are Kerstin Dautenhahn and Takayuki Kanda.
More info here.
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Congratulations to our members Francisco C. Santos and Alberto Sardinha for coordinating two new projects approved by FCT!
This national funding selected only 8 projects out of 184 submitted in the Computer Science area, and GAIPS coordinates 2. Wonderful news!
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Alberto Sardinha gave a talk (in Portuguese) with João Araújo about Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering for the event STCT Norte Nordeste.
Watch it here.
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Ana Paiva gave a talk (in Portuguese) with the title "Can robots have emotions?" under the Cogito Masterclasses.
Check it here.
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Treme-Treme game, launched in 2015, was developed by Professor Carlos Sousa Oliveira and Mónica Amaral Ferreira, from CERIS, and a team from GAIPS composed by Professor Rui Prada and the MSc students Pedro Barreto, Duarte Botelho e Inês Batina.
Although it was designed for 7-9 years old children, the game also helps adults to remember concepts related to #SeismicRisk and what to do before, during and after an #Earthquake.
To celebrate this year's International Day for Disaster Reduction this game was made available on a new version for Android, in addition to its free online version!
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The RAGE Project is nominated for the 2020 Computable award on Digital Transformations. GAIPS was responsible for one of the work packages on components for Strategic and Social Agency for applied games. Congratulations!
The full list of nominees is available here.
You can vote here until Nov 1st.
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The project ID-GAMING submitted to Erasmus+ has just been approved!
The goal is to create a training program to improve the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities through serious games.
Congratulations to Rui Prada & Hugo Nicolau from INESC-ID/IST!
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Francisco C. Santos successfully passed his habilitation exam. Congratulations!
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No ano passado, o Rui Prada participou no 1º SEVj sobre o ensino de videojogos em Portugal. Partilhamos as atas que resumem as apresentações e incluem as conclusões da discussão final, listando um conjunto de pontos que a comunidade deve considerar.
https://estudogeral.sib.uc.pt/bitstream/10316/89402/1/1SEVj_Atas.pdf
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Our collaborator and former PhD student at GAIPS, Vítor V. Vasconcelos, now at Princeton University, was distinguished with the "Bragança Gil Prize" from the Portuguese Physics Society for the best PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Vítor!!!
This award was announced in September 2020, during the FISICA2020 meeting. Vítor received his PhD in Science from U. Minho and was hosted by GAIPS/INESC-ID. His dissertation was advised by Jorge M. Pacheco and Francisco C. Santos.
Vítor's research covers a broad range of topics addressing the management of public goods, the resilience of ecological systems, and evolutionary biology by using and developing tools and resources in the areas of complex systems, computational ecology, stochastic processes, game theory, scientific computing, network science, and numerical methods.
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The 2nd edition of Andreas Wichert book "Principles of Quantum Artificial Intelligence: Quantum Problem Solving and Machine Learning” was published by World Scientific.
New topics include Quantum Machine Learning, Linear Algebra Based Quantum Machine Learning, Adiabatic Quantum Computation, Quantum Annealing, Quantum Like Bayesian Networks.
The book is available here.
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Congratulations to our members Raquel Oliveira, Ana Paiva and the collaborators Patricia Arriaga & Louis-Philippe Morency.
AGENTS is about humor generation and the effects of #humor in #humanrobotinteraction in #entertainment scenarios.
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Congratulations to the our members involved in the two new projects on Artificial Intelligence funded by European Commission!
Ana Paiva is a member of the leadership team of TAILOR Project. And HumanE-AI-Net Project partners are Ana Paiva, Rui Prada and Francisco Melo. Great job!
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Due to coronavirus pandemic, the HRI conference was physically cancelled and was held online;. We are proud to announce our team presented 1 full paper, 2 workshop pioneers, 1 LBR, and 1 video!
Patrícia presented a full paper entitled "Creativity Encounters Between Children and Robots" and a video: YOLO - Your Own Living Object. Mojgan presented "Persuasive Social Robots using Reward/Coercion Strategies" as a Late Breaking Report and a Pioneer workshop, "The Application of Social Power in Persuasive Social Robots". And Elmira presented her work entitled "Changing Perspective as A Learning Mechanism" at Pioneer workshop.
Presentation videos are available at ACM YouTube channel.
By the way, we are now on Twitter and Instagram;! Help us celebrate it by following us!
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To reduce social contact and the spread of the infection of the coronavirus, we have started working from home. During this self-isolation period, we still have our regular meetings, now online, and have started virtual coffee breaks.
P.S. GAIPS Lounge's Twitter account is up already. Have a look! @GaipsLounge
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Our researcher Fernando Pedro Santos was distinguished with the prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Artificial Intelligence 2017-2018. The thesis 'Dynamics of Reputation and the Self‐organization of Cooperation' was awarded by APPIA - Associação Portuguesa para a Inteligência Artificial.
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We were pleased to receive prof. Tambe's talk about their amazing work on AI for Social Good.
Abstract: With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. I will focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation and public health in low-resource communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to strategically deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. I will discuss the importance of conducting this research via building the full data to field deployment end-to-end pipeline rather than just building machine learning or planning components in isolation. Results from our deployments from around the world show concrete improvements over the state of the art. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can indeed play an important role in fighting social injustice and improving society.
Bio: Milind Tambe is Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California(USC) and the Founding Co-Director of CAIS, the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, where his research focuses on advancing AI and multiagent systems research for Social Good. He is recipient of the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) John McCarthy Award, ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award from AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference), AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Robert S Engelmore Memorial Lecture award, INFORMS Wagner prize, the Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research Society, the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award, International Foundation for Agents and Multiagent Systems influential paper award; he is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. He has also received meritorious Commendation from the US Coast Guard and LA Airport Police, and Certificate of Appreciation from US Federal Air Marshals Service for pioneering real-world deployments of security games. Prof. Tambe has also co-founded a company based on his research, Avata Intelligence , where he serves as the director of research. Prof. Tambe received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
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There’s one more accomplishement by our team in the HRI Conference of this year: 1st place in the Video Competion with the video “Exploring Collaborative Interactions Between Robots and Blind People”. Congratulations to Filipa Correia and all the people involved!
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GAIPS team was well-represented at the HRI Conference: Ana Paiva gave two keynotes in two different workshops; Patrícia Alves-Oliveria organized one workshop and presented a workshop paper; Filipa was accepted as an HRI Pioneer and presented her poster; Raquel Oliveira and Filipa Correia presented two full-papers; a video of a project from Social Robotics course was part of the Video Competition, and Patrícia was invited to present her most recent journal paper accepted at the HRI. Amazing work!
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Raul Paradeda and Maria José Ferreira just came back from the 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) that took place in Dublin. They presented their work 'Communicating Assertiveness in Robotic Storytellers' and run a demo entitled 'Would you follow the suggestions of a storyteller robot', with Emys. Good job!
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Two members of GAIPS Lab, Filipa Correia, and Patrícia Alves-Oliveira attended the Symposium on Interdisciplinary Insights into Group Dynamics, held at TU Delft, Netherlands. This Symposium brought together researchers from Computer Science and Psychology to discuss the latest developments on Group Dynamics research.
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We are starting a reading group covering recent topics of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), in the hope of encouraging higher-level discussion about issues relevant to the field. The meetings will occur every Friday from 16h00 to 17h00 in room 2N 7.1 in the Taguspark campus. Whether you want to join or simply follow our progress, you can check the reading group website https://gaips.inesc-id.pt/hri-reading-…/. For more information, please contact baraka.kim@gmail.com or filipaincorreia@gmail.com.
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On the 27th of June, the GAIPS team from Project INSIDE went to the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Symposium 2017, held at Porto Business School. We participated in a panel, with a talk given by Professor Franscisco Melo, and, for the first time, in a demo session with our new robot, ASTRo!
ASTRo stole the show, as it interacted with the attendees, inviting them to play a turn-taking game of Tangram!
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GAIPS team was invited to show our work during Dia do Técnico, an event held every year to commemorate the anniversary of Instituto Superior Técnico. To celebrate its 106th anniversary, we participated in the Keep in Touch – Next Generation with two demos.
During the event held inside DEI's library, we presented the newly developed FAtiMA VR Demo (RAGE Project) and some games developed in the Digital Game's Courses (Laboratório de Jogos).
The activities were a success among the participants! Professors, Researchers and Staff brought their families to discover the careers of the future and they all had a great time!
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It will be about exposing and discussing the social and economical impacts of introducing artificial intelligence and robotics in the Portuguese society.
Please share with anyone you think might be interested.
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Prof. Francisco Santos won the 2017 Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics of the German Physical Society! This award recognizes outstanding original contributions to a better understanding of socio-economic systems.
The award ceremony occurs on Monday 20th March, in Dresden, Germany.
More information about the award session, here.
Congratulations!!!
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We are pleased to announce that the new version of the FAtiMA agent architecture, named FAtiMA Toolkit, is currently available as an open-source project on GitHub:
https://github.com/GAIPS-INESC-ID/FAtiMA-Toolkit
Besides porting the code from Java to C#, the new FAtiMA offers many significant improvements over its previous iterations, such as the inclusion of dedicated authoring tools and the ability to work on multiple application environments (Windows, Mac, Browser, iOS, Android, Linux).
FAtiMA Toolkit is currently being developed under the RAGE H2020 project.
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Vítor V. Vasconcelos has successfully defended his PhD with the highest distinction. Well done, Vítor!!!
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There is a new robot in the GAIPS laboratory!
The next time you go to our lab, you might find a new robotic resident moving around.
It is eager to meet everyone who comes to know it.
See a picture of the robot below.
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We are looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral fellow to integrate the GAIPS research team for project INSIDE.
INSIDE is a research project that investigates symbiotic human-robot interactionand applications to the therapy of children with autism spectrum disorders. The INSIDE consortium includes INESC-ID, from Portugal, Carnegie Mellon University, from the USA, and Instituto Superior Técnico, Nova University, Hospital Garcia de Orta, all from Portugal. It also includes three Portuguese SMEs (IDMind, PLUX and VoiceInteraction).
The hired post-doctoral researcher is expected to contribute to both the fundamental and the technological research in INSIDE, while also assuming a coordinating role of other grantees working in development. In particular, the researcher is expected to contribute to one or more of the following topics:
- Development of a hierarchical architecture for human-robot unstructured interaction that accommodates sensing, reasoning and acting at the task, action and motor levels;
- Deployment of novel machine learning approaches allowing a robot to learn interaction strategies from human examples obtained during wizard-of-oz studies; such approaches should be able to handle sparse, incomplete and noisy data;
The grantee is also expected to participate in all project meetings.
The grant has duration of 12 months, starting on 01/12/2016, and can be renewed up to August 2018 (renewal is subject to suitable performance). The fellowship contract will be celebrated according to the current “Regulations for Research Grants of the Foundation for Science and Technology", the INESC-ID Grant regulations approved by FCT, and to the Status of Scientific Research Fellow (Lei nº 40/2004 de 18 de Agosto, and its successive amendments). It includes a monthly stipend of 1495 euros, in accordance with the values stipulated in the “Regulations for Research Grants of the Foundation for Science and Technology” and INESC-ID Lisboa Grant Regulations approved by FCT as well as accident insurance and social security contribution.
The researcher will integrate the GAIPS group of INESC-ID, in TagusPark, and be supervised by Prof. Francisco S. Melo.
Selection process
The successful candidates are expected to hold a PhD in computer science, electrical engineering or related area, with experience in one (or more) of the following areas:
- Human-robot interaction;
- Machine learning;
The selection will be based on the following criteria:
- Academic record of the candidate (including publication record and past experience in research projects) and relevance of the research areas of the candidate with respect to the goals of the project (70%);
- (20%) Motivation letter;
- (10%) Personal references;
The candidates may be subject to an interview, and the jury may decide to offer or not the fellowship, depending on the applicants CV and performance. For interviewed candidates, the interview will count for 50% of the evaluation of each criteria above.
The Jury may also decide not to assign the fellowship, if none of candidates meets the required conditions.
The jury will convene in 30/11/2014 and is composed of
The final evaluation results will be publicized through an ordered list, and the candidates will be notified of the Jury decision by email.
Application process
Candidates should submit:
- A detailed CV (including list of publications)
- Motivation letter
- Copy of official academic degree certificates
- Name of two personal references
Deadline for application:
Submissions should be sent by e-mail to:
Francisco S. Melo
E-mail: fmelo @ inesc - id . pt
Address:
INESC-ID / Instituto Superior Técnico
TagusPark, Edifício IST
Av. Prof. Dr. Aníbal Cavaco Silva,
2744-016 Porto Salvo
Portugal
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GAIPS team had 6 papers accepted at RO-MAN conference!!!
RO-MAN conference is a well known conference in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and this year took place in New York City between 26-31 August.
Gaips team was well represented with 5 papers as oral paper presentation and 1 as poster in the interactive session.
Congratulations to everyone for this awesome work and good luck in your future endeavors!
For more info on the conference follow the link here.
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Gal Kaminka visited our group today.
He gave a talk entitled "Teams, Swarms, Crowds, and Collectives: Special Cases?"
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Prof. Francisco Santos won the scientific award Universidade de Lisboa/Caixa Geral de Depósitos, in the area of Computer Science and Computer Engineering! This annual prize awards the merit of scientific activity and the publication of articles in international journals of recognized quality.
More info here.
Congratulations!!
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EMOTE project was granted an Excellent evaluation in the Final Review Meeting! Wow!
EMOTE was a wonderful project, full of interesting research accomplishments and with a great team that had lots of fun working together.
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Fernando Santos has won the Best Paper Award at the Adaptive Learning Agents (ALA) workshop at AAMAS 2016 with the paper:
“Multiplayer ultimatum game in populations of autonomous agents”, by Fernando P. Santos, Francisco C. Santos, Francisco S. Melo, Ana Paiva and Jorge M. Pacheco
Congrats!
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Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML) visited GAIPS to meet the robots and interact with them. The group of 12 older adults spent an enjoyable and unusual afternoon surrounded by some of GAIPS' latest projects.
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Our EMOTE team has won the Best Paper Award on HRI Interaction Design at HRI 2016 with the paper:
“Discovering Social Interaction Strategies for Robots from Restricted-Perception Wizard-of-Oz Studies”, by Pedro Sequeira, Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, Tiago Ribeiro, Eugenio Di Tullio, Sofia Petisca, Francisco S. Melo, Ginevra Castellano, and Ana Paiva.
Congratulations all!
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The 2nd place in the HRI Video Competition rewarded the Sueca social robotic player of the PArCEIRO project. The video shows some curious interactions between EMYS, its partners and its opponents during the user study.
SUECA - Building a Social Robot as a Game Companion in a Card Game from Tiago Ribeiro on Vimeo.
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INESC-ID PhD Student Award 2015 was given to Samuel Mascarenhas!
This award was appointed on Saturday at the Inesc-ID Annual Meeting.
Samuel received this award from Prof. Luís Rodrigues and Prof. Luís Miguel Silveira.
Congratulations Samuel!
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The EMOTE project was one of the selected EU projects to be in exhibition at ICT 2015!
Our GAIPS team was there presenting one of the EMOTE scenarios to EU Comissioner Günther Oettinger, Pedro Cabrita Carneiro vice-president of FCT, and Carlos Manuel Castro from the Lisbon City Hall (CML).
ICT is the main european event on digital technology and is organized by the European Comission. This year it's happening in Lisbon, and holds an exhibition that is open to the general public, so that everyone can see how research can impact people's lives.
The exhibition is located at Terreiro do Paço (Praça do Comércio) and runs until October 22nd.
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We had 3 papers accepted at 2015 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. Two related to Geometry Friends Game AI Competition and one to project EMOTE.
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Nao, the empathic robotic-tutor developed by the EMOTE project, is in school for two months to teach about sustainable development.
Students from the Quinta do Marquês School have been learning about geography topics with the empathic robotic-tutor.
The robot helps them discover how a sustainable city can be developed, and how challenging this process can be.
Long-term studies in real world environments are such an amazing experience!
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We had the pleasure to receive Ernesto Vilar (University of Beira Interior) director of Master Program on Game Design and Development and André Neves (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco).
They presented work about the development of Applied Games for Health and the Design Thinking Canvas methodology with successful examples of its application in games in Brazil.
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EMOTE project went to Colégio Campo de Flores School to give a class about robots in school!
Students and teachers have met Patrícia Alves-Oliveira and Tiago Ribeiro at Colégio Campo de Flores to discuss issues related with the inclusion of robots in schools.
Due to the great curiosity of the youngest, different subjects regarding robots came to light. During this class they discussed topics related with emotional intelligence, the state of the art on artificial intelligence, and how the inclusion of robots in schools can affect learning.
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The GAIPS team had a wonderful day when the MobileLife researchers visited us. Some of our demos were shown, and the MobileLife visit made us think about the meaning of the research we are doing! Really good.
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Prof. David Traum from ICT, USC gave a talk on
Non-cooperative and Deceptive Dialogue
David Traum
Director of Natural Language Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies
Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC)
Abstract
Cooperation is usually seen as a central concept in the pragmatics of dialogue. There are a number of accounts of dialogue performance and interpretation that require some notion of cooperation or collaboration as part of the explanatory mechanism of communication (E.g., Grice s maxims, interpretation of indirect speech acts, etc). Most advanced computational work on dialogue systems has also generally assumed cooperativity, and recognizing and conforming to the users intention as central to the success of the dialogue system. In this talk I will review some recent work on modeling non-cooperative dialogue, and the creation of virtual humans who engage in Non-cooperative and deceptive dialogue. These include tactical questioning role-playing agents, who have conditions under which they will reveal truthful or misleading information, and negotiating agents, whose goals may be at odds with a human dialogue participant, and calculate utilities for different dialogue strategies, and also have an ability to keep secrets using plan-based inference to avoid giving clues that would reveal the secret.
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Rui Prada delivered an invited lecture discussing the role of emotions in gameplay experience and the creation of believable interactive autonomous characters at Instituto Superior Técnico and Faculdade de Ciências of University of Lisbon.
Check the lecture here.
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Part of PArCEIRO team members presented the project to a senior audience that live in a day care centre at Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa. Seniors "shook hands" with the project with interest and curiosity.
PArCEIRO was warmly welcomed!
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Last Thursday one of the groups from PArCEIRO team accomplished successfully the first part of data collection with the Coup Card Game. Participants accepted the challenge and came to play with each other, mastering their bluff skills to be able to win the game!
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Prof. Ana Paiva participated in the Summit on the Global Agenda 2014 from the World Economic Forum (see event homepage) in Dubai from the 9th until the 12th of November.
During two and a half days, a network of Global Agenda Councils (GAC) held lively discussions, and Prof. Ana Paiva participated in the GAC on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. As a result of these intensive and stimulating days of work, the UAE (United Arab Emirates) in partnership with the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council (GAC) on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics launched a new council that will “offer advice on the best ways to use robotics and artificial intelligence to improve people’s lives” (see WEF summit closes with UAE launching initiative on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence). The founding members of the Council comprise leading researchers and innovators from the world’s best research institutes, universities, and companies, including Instituto Superior Técnico from the University of Lisbon. “I’m extremely excited with the possibility of collaborating with the UAE to develop a global plan that will encourage research and the public to understand and recognise the positive impact that Artificial Intelligence and Robotics can have in our society”. The council announced as its first initiative, the UAE “Robots for Good” Award, aimed at encouraging research and application of innovative solutions to improve people’s lives, ranging from hardware to software intelligence and artificial agents. Other initiatives of the Council will in the future include educational conferences, the use of robotics in UAE schools and universities, and leading policies on the humanitarian and positive uses of robotics and artificial intelligence.
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PArCEIRO's team got together for the kick off of our new project!
PArCEIRO will develop and create social robots that will interact with humans in entertaining activities, such as tabletop card games. This projects aims to promote social interaction where the same physical space between humans and robots is shared, enhancing new ways of interacting with technology.
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The work performed by some members of the EMOTE team will be broadcasted in different countries worldwide in a TV Show about Science and Research.
The German production company Context-Film flew to GAIPS Lab to meet members of EMOTE. The production team filmed about the work that has been developed in the project concerning the development of an empathic robotic tutor.
The experience was amazing!
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After a full week in Externato Marista de Lisboa the EMOTE Project team successfully tested a Wizard of Oz with NAO helping students from 10th grade to play and learn about how to build a sustainable city. This way NAO was able to interact with the students and help them in their learning process.
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We are opening 4 research grants to young students in the areas of Computer Science (Eng. Informática) or Electrical and Computer Engineering (Eng. Electrotécnica e de Computadores) who want to spend two months at GAIPS building intelligent behaviours for a social robot.
The internship will have a duration of 2 months from July 2nd 2014 (with a break in during 10 days in August). The grants may be renewed within the period of the project, not exceeding the maximum period set by FCT for such grants.
This year the internships will feature the creation of a small game of object manipulation by the robot Baxter (see http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/products/baxter/) based in direct instructions given by the users. The interns will have to learn how to create behaviours in Baxter (using ROS) and develop the small scenario with Lego blocks.
For more information go to the Internships section: here.
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André Pereira, former GAIPS researcher, presented the full paper "Improving Social Presence in Human-Agent Interaction" at CHI'2014.
The paper presents work developed on his PhD supervised by Prof. Rui Prada and Prof. Ana Paiva. The presentation was very well received by the community.
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Two 6-months research grants (BI-L “Bolsas para Licenciado”) are now available within the project MAS-G2: Multi-Agent Simulation of Global Governance (EXPL/EEI-SII/2556/2013). Application Dates: From 05/05/2014 to 16/05/2014.
This project focus on problems in which individual goals collide with collective endeavors. Such conflicts occur at all scales and levels of complexity. From the very origin of multi-cellularity, to human social behavior and policy-making, many of these phenomena, rely on a proper formulation and understanding of conflict, competition and self-organization. These topics will be addressed by means of computational models resorting to a broad range of tools common to research in complex systems, such as game theory, complex networks, agent-based simulations, dynamical systems and artificial intelligence.
Please check here or here for further details or contact
Francisco C. Santos
Email: franciscocsantos@ist.utl.pt
Address: INESC-ID / Instituto Superior Técnico - Taguspark, Av. Prof. Dr. Cavaco Silva, 2744-016 Porto Salvo, Portugal
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Former IST student and GAIPS researcher Iolanda Leite received an honorable mention in IFAAMAS-13 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. The dissertation entitled Long-term Interactions with Empathic Social Robots was advised by Prof. Carlos Martinho and Prof. Ana Paiva.
This award is named after Professor Victor Lesser, a long standing member of the AAMAS community who has graduated a large number of outstanding PhD students in the area. It is awarded for dissertations written as part of a PhD defended in the specified year, nominated by the supervisor (with supporting references), which show originality, depth, impact and written quality, supported by quality publications. The award is sponsored by IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and will be presented at AAMAS-2014 Conference in Paris.
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The SIREN game won the 2013 European Serious Game awards for the best learning game!
SIREN: a Social game for conflict REsolution based on natural iNteraction, created by the Siren consortium (EU project) won the 1st place on the best learning game category. The competition was organized by the GALA Network, the Serious Games Society and SG academy.
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The book "Design e Desenvolvimento de Jogos" has just been released. It brings an overview of the principles of game and experience design and development to the Portuguese speaking community.
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We are really happy that the Traveller Demo/Poster about the work done in the Ecute project won the Best Student Poster Award at the INTERACT conference.
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Our work in the EMOTE project was featured in an article published in The Economist about collaboration between robots and humans:
"Another approach uses sensors to assess the state of nearby humans, so that robots can respond appropriately. With funding from the European Union, researchers are using bracelets equipped with electrodes to enable classroom robots to determine whether students are bored, confused or anxious. The robots can adapt their teaching style accordingly, says Iolanda Leite of the Instituto Superior Técnico, a Portuguese university participating in the programme, which is called EMOTE. One of its objectives is to foster “social bonding” between people and robots."
The full article is available online here.
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In an article published in July 14th in Nature Climate Change, a team composed by researchers from GAIPS/INESC-ID and Universities of Minho and Lisbon have shown in which way institutions should be formed and how important they will be in sustaining cooperation in climate agreements.
This work indicates that a polycentric, bottom-up approach, involving multiple institutions will be more efficient in achieving global cooperation, in contrast with a single institution (such as the United Nations) which provides marginal improvements regarding cooperation. These results — grounded on game theory and multi-agent simulations — call for a revision of our strategy to address such complex global problem: While most causes of climate change result from the combined action of all inhabitants of our planet, therefore suggesting global attempts, the solutions for the dilemma we all face may be easier to achieve at a much smaller scale. In light of these results, the widely repeated motto “Think globally, act locally” would hardly appear more appropriate.
Ref: Vítor V. Vasconcelos, Francisco C. Santos and Jorge M. Pacheco, A bottom-up institutional approach to cooperative governance of risky commons, Nature Climate Change 3 (9) pp. 797-801 (2013) — published online 14th July 2013.
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We are proud to announce that our papel entitled "Nutty Tracks - Symbolic Animation Pipeline for Expressive Robotics" has just been selected for the SIGGRAPH 2013 ACM SRC competition! (video)
Out of 116 posters exhibited at the conference, 16 were selected as semi-finalists for the student competition. Let's cross our fingers and hope we get to the finals!
Abstract:
NuttyTracks is a symbolic real-time animation system for animating any robotic character using animation tools commonly used by professional animators. Our system brings artists and programmers closer to each other in the quest for creating the illusion of life in robotic characters.
Here is a video that demonstrates our work:
Nutty Tracks - Symbolic Animation Pipeline for Expressive Robotics from Tiago Ribeiro on Vimeo.
SIGGRAPH 2013 Conference: http://s2013.siggraph.org/
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Submissions to the Geometry Friends Game AI Competition are open.
Submission deadline: July 26
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The GAIPS group is accepting applications for this year's
Summer Internships in AI in Games –
BSc or MSc students
Description
Objectives / summary
This year the internships will feature the creation of AI for a small game that will be played on an interactive table (http://www.multitaction.com/products/). The AI will be displayed through the actions of a social robot (http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/en/) playing that game with humans.
Duration
2 months from 15th June to 15th August, 2013.
Monthly amount
The monthly amount of the grant is 745 euros for MSc Students and 565 euros for BSc Students in accordance with the values stipulated in the “Regulations for Advanced Training and Qualification of Human Resources” of FCT and INESC-ID Lisboa grant regulations approved by FCT, and shall be rendered payable via bank transfer to an account held by the grantee.
Scientific supervision
The activity will be supervised by Professor Ana Paiva, Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, and Project Leading Researcher at INESC-ID. The student will be integrated at INESC-ID Taguspark in the GAIPS GROUP http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/
Required education Level and research experience
Applicants can be finishing the BSc, or be MSc students, but should be able to work full time during these two Summer Months. Applications must be sent to Iolanda Leite (iolanda.leite@ist.utl.pt) and include a CV, a brief statement about research interests and motivation to join the project.
Evaluation criteria
The selection of candidates will be based on academic record and research interests. English language level will also be considered as criteria.
Results
The final evaluation results will be publicized through an ordered list, and the candidates will be notified of the Jury decision by email.
Documents to be submitted
Detailed curriculum vitae; motivation letter; copy of academic study certificates
Durations: 2 Months
Limit Date to Reply: 13-May-2013
Contact: Sandra Maria Lopes de Sá
Scholarship Email: iolanda.leite@ist.utl.pt
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Summer Internships in AI in Games
at GAIPS, INESC-ID
INESC-ID - www.inesc-id.pt
4 Positions Available
Application Deadline: 5/6/2012
Duration of the grants: 15th June- 15th August
Contact: jose.alberto.sardinha@ist.utl.pt
The GAIPS group from INESC-ID Lisbon (http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/) is seeking young students that want to spend two Months at GAIPS building intelligent agents for games.
There are several AI competitions worldwide (see for example http://geneura.ugr.es/cig2012/competitions.html or http://www.sics.se/tac/) and the goal of these internships for students to take steps towards creating bots to compete in these international competitions.
Applicants can be finishing the BSc, or be MSc students, but should be able to work full time during these two Summer Months. Applications must be sent to Alberto Sardinha (jose.alberto.sardinha@ist.utl.pt) and include a CV, a brief statement about research interests and motivation to join the project.
The selection of candidates will be based on academic record and research interests.
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