News
Exploring a Japanese Cooking Database (HRI 2024)
In March 2024, Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) and Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) presented Exploring a Japanese Cooking Database: A robot uses GenAI and a knowledge graph to chat about culinary delights at 19th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado.
GenAI for spoken dialogue systems (IWSDS 2024)
In March 2024, Graham Wilcock presented New Technologies for Spoken Dialogue Systems: LLMs, RAG and the GenAI Stack at 14th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS 2024), Sapporo, Japan.
Comparing ChatGPT and knowledge graphs
(RO-MAN 2023)
(RO-MAN 2023)
In August 2023, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) and Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) presented To err is robotic; to earn trust, divine: Comparing ChatGPT and knowledge graphs for HRI at 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2023), Busan, Korea. The paper, which was 5th most popular at the conference, was published in the RO-MAN 2023 proceedings.
Bilingual Japanese/English robot dialogues
(JSAI 2023)
(JSAI 2023)
In June 2023, Graham Wilcock presented Bilingual Japanese/English robot dialogues with knowledge graphs and conversational AI at 37th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI 2023), Kumamoto, Japan. The paper was published in the JSAI 2023 proceedings.
Affective computing and knowledge graphs (ACII 2022)
In October 2022, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) and Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) gave a demo about social robots and knowledge graphs at 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2022), Nara, Japan. A set of videos explain the work presented in the demo. The demo paper Should robots indicate the trustworthiness of information from knowledge graphs? was published in the ACII 2022 proceedings.
More cooperative robot behaviour
(RO-MAN 2022)
(RO-MAN 2022)
In August 2022, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) and Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) presented Cooperative and uncooperative behaviour in task-oriented dialogues with social robots at 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022), Napoli, Italy. The paper was published in the RO-MAN 2022 proceedings.
More intelligent responses using semantic metadata (JSAI 2022)
In June 2022, Graham Wilcock presented Generating more intelligent responses with conversational AI and knowledge graphs at 36th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI 2022), Kyoto, Japan. The paper was published in the JSAI 2022 proceedings.
Conversational AI and knowledge graphs
(HRI 2022)
(HRI 2022)
In March 2022, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) and Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) presented Conversational AI and knowledge graphs for social robot interaction at 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2022), Sapporo, Japan. The paper was published in the HRI 2022 proceedings.
Ethical issues in social robot interaction (RO-MAN 2021)
In August 2021, Do You Remember Me? Ethical Issues in Long-Term Social Robot Interactions by Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) and Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) was presented at 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2021). The paper was published in the RO-MAN 2021 proceedings.
CityTalk and Rasa conversational AI (JSAI 2021)
In June 2021, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) gave a presentation about CityTalk and Rasa conversational AI at 35th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. His paper Recognising flexible intents and multiple domains in extended human-robot dialogues was selected for publication in Advances in Artificial Intelligence - Selected Papers from the Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI 2021).
WikiTalk and WikiListen (ECAI 2020)
In September 2020, Graham Wilcock (CDM Interact) and Kristiina Jokinen (AIRC, AIST, Japan) gave a presentation about WikiTalk and WikiListen at 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020). Their paper WikiTalk and WikiListen: Towards listening robots that can join in conversations with topically relevant contributions was published in the ECAI 2020 proceedings.
ERICA and WikiTalk (IJCAI 2019)
In August 2019, a demo of ERICA and WikiTalk was presented at 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019) in Macao, China. The paper ERICA and WikiTalk by Divesh Lala, Graham Wilcock, Kristiina Jokinen and Tatsuya Kawahara was published in the IJCAI 2019 proceedings.
Visiting Professor at Kyoto University (2018-19)
In 2018-19, Graham Wilcock was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, invited by Professor Tatsuya Kawahara of the Graduate School of Informatics. He taught a course on talking robots, participated in research seminars on spoken dialogue systems, and worked with the ERICA android robot in the ERATO Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction project. Divesh Lala and Graham Wilcock added a Wikipedia-based talking role for ERICA, with WikiTalk supporting smooth dialogue shifts to related Wikipedia topics, and Julius speech recognition supporting spoken dialogue barge-ins by the human partner while ERICA is speaking.
CityTalk and PyDial (IJCAI 2018)
In July 2018, Graham Wilcock gave a demo of CityTalk and PyDial at 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018) in Stockholm, Sweden. His paper Using a Deep Learning Dialogue Research Toolkit in a Multilingual Multidomain Practical Application was published in the IJCAI 2018 proceedings.
WikiTalk wins an award (ICSR 2017)
In November 2017, WikiTalk won a Special Recognition award for Best Robot Design (Software Category) at 9th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2017) in Tsukuba, Japan. The award was made to Kristiina Jokinen and Graham Wilcock for their competition entry Next Steps for Social Robots.
Springer book: Dialogues with Social Robots
In February 2017, Dialogues with Social Robots edited by Kristiina Jokinen and Graham Wilcock was published by Springer in the series Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering. The publisher says: This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing.
Bilingual WikiTalk: English and Japanese
(COLING 2016)
(COLING 2016)
In December 2016, Kristiina Jokinen and Graham Wilcock gave a demo of WikiTalk in English and Japanese at 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2016) in Osaka, Japan. A paper What topic do you want to hear about? A bilingual talking robot using English and Japanese Wikipedias by Graham Wilcock, Kristiina Jokinen and Seiichi Yamamoto was published in the COLING 2016 proceedings.
SamiTalk (IWSDS 2016)
In January 2016, 7th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS 2016) was held in Saariselkä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Academy of Finland DigiSami project directed by Kristiina Jokinen. A video Towards SamiTalk: a Sami-speaking robot linked to Sami Wikipedia was presented by Graham Wilcock.