Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

IEEE Senior Member.

Xavier Alameda-Pineda has become an IEEE Senior Member on February 1st, 2019. The grade of Senior Member requires experience reflecting professional maturity as an engineer, scientist, educator, technical executive, or originator in IEEE-designated fields for a total of 10 years and have demonstrated 5 years of significant performance.

H2020 Project SPRING

(1 Januray 2020 – 31 December 2023) is a research and innovation action (RIA) with eight partners: Inria Grenoble (coordinator), Università degli Studi di Trento, Czech Technical University Prague, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv, ERM Automatismes Industriels Carpentras, PAL Robotics Barcelona, and Hôpital Broca Paris.. The main objective of SPRING (Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare) is the development of socially assistive robots with the capacity of performing multimodal multiple-person interaction and open-domain dialogue. In more detail:

• The scientific objective of SPRING is to develop a novel paradigm and novel concept of socially-aware robots, and to conceive innovative methods and algorithms for computer vision, audio processing, sensor-based control, and spoken dialog systems based on modern statistical- and deep-learning to ground the required social robot skills.

• The technological objective of SPRING is to create and launch a brand new generation of robots that are flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the users, and not the other way around.

• The experimental objective of SPRING is twofold: to validate the technology based on HRI experiments in a gerontology hospital, and to assess its acceptability by patients and medical staff.

Website: https://spring-h2020.eu/

ANR JCJC Project ML3RI

(1 March 2020 – 28 February 2024) has been awarded to Xavier Alameda-Pineda. Multi-person robot interaction in the wild (i.e. unconstrained and using only the robot's resources) is nowadays unachievable because of the lack of suitable machine perception and decision-taking models. Multi-Modal Multi-person Low-Level Learning models for Robot Interaction (ML3RI) has the ambition to develop the capacity to understand and react to low-level behavioral cues, which is crucial for autonomous robot communication. The main scientific impact of ML3RI is to develop new learning methods and algorithms, thus opening the door to study multi-party conversations with robots. In addition, the project supports open and reproducible research.

MIAI Chair.

The Multidisciplinary Institue in Artificial Intelligence (MIAI) is one of the four AI French institutes launched in 2019 by the French government. MIAI is structured around several chairs, each chair gathering 3-6 researchers as well as postdocs and PhD students. Team members Radu Horaud and Xavier Alameda-Pineda are co-chairs of the Audio-visual machine perception and interaction for companion robots chair. The development of methods and algorithms for enabling socially-aware robot behavior with the specific goal of interacting with humans is the core topic. The emphasis is put on unsupervised and weakly supervised learning with audio and visual data, based on Bayesian methods, deep learning and reinforcement learning. It is planned to develop challenging proof-of-concept implementations and demonstrators.