PhD Fellow: Chinmaya Mishra
I am a PhD fellow working in Furhat Robotics, Stockholm under the supervision of Prof. Gabriel Skantze and Prof. Peter Hagoort. As part of my PhD project, I plan to investigate the areas which could contribute in enabling Social Robots to hold conversations that seem more natural in a social setting. Based on the investigation, computational models for high-level communication skill would then be developed.
With a Bachelor’s in computer science & Engineering from Institute of technical Education & Research (ITER), India and 3 years of industry experience as a Systems Engineer in Tata Consultancy Service, India, I joined the Master’s Program in TU Kaiserslautern, Germany with a specialization of Intelligent Systems (AI) in 2016. My Master’s thesis was titled “Behaviour Based Human-Robot Interaction” where we modelled emotions to drive behavior generation in a humanoid robot.
Social Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Emotion Modelling and Behavior Modelling are a few research areas that attract me. My motivation lies in developing systems using AI which could be useful to the society. In my free time I love going on treks, capturing moments through lens, listening to music, and trying to play instruments among others.
Objectives:
For social robots and conversational agents to take part in real-life interactions with users, these robots need to possess certain social and conversational skills that will enable them to interact naturally with a human partner, using language, gesture, and other cognitive and social skills that reflect aspects of the user’s behaviour. These include models of engagement, joint attention, personality style and collaborative state. ESR15 will contribute to developing computational models of high-level conversational skills in a multiparty human-robot interaction set-up (two humans, one robot). Using an interaction set-up based on language-learning problem solving with one robot, a touch table, and two humans, ESR15 will exploit a number of social signals derived from sensors of human behavior (cameras, microphones, gaze tracker, etc.) to develop data-driven models of conversational skills that will deepen our understanding of human-robot interactions.
Expected results:
A scientific platform for exploring models of conversational skill and for the assessment of multiparty human-robot interaction behavior. This platform will be used to perform user tests and build universal computational models of engagement, joint attention, involvement and other signals that allow the robot to adapt its behavior to maximize the efficiency of the interaction.
Based in Stockholm, Sweden
Full-time three-year contract, starting September 2020
PhD enrolment at: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics / Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Main supervisors’ institutions: Furhat Robotics, Stockholm, Sweden, and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Main supervisors: Prof Gabriel Skantze and Prof Peter Hagoort
Secondments:
- HU-ZAS, Berlin: training in recording and analysis of head motion in multi-party conversations (5 months);
- MPG, Nijmegen: experimental training on testing the efficiency of the interaction set-up (5,5 months).
Co-supervisor’s institution:
- HU-ZAS, Berlin, Germany