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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Towards a Synthetic Tutor Assistant: The EASEL Project and its Architecture

Authors : Vasiliki Vouloutsi, Maria Blancas, Riccardo Zucca, Pedro Omedas, Dennis Reidsma, Daniel Davison, Vicky Charisi, Frances Wijnen, Jan van der Meij, Vanessa Evers, David Cameron, Samuel Fernando, Roger Moore, Tony Prescott, Daniele Mazzei, Michael Pieroni, Lorenzo Cominelli, Roberto Garofalo, Danilo De Rossi, Paul F. M. J. Verschure

Published in: Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, discrimination of the learner’s utterances, expressions and mental states, which, in turn, require an integrated architecture combining perception, cognition and action. In this paper we present an attempt to improve the current state of robots in the educational domain by introducing the EASEL EU project. Specifically, we introduce the EASEL’s unified robot architecture, an innovative Synthetic Tutor Assistant (STA) whose goal is to interactively guide learners in a science-based learning paradigm, allowing us to achieve such rich multimodal interactions.

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Metadata
Title
Towards a Synthetic Tutor Assistant: The EASEL Project and its Architecture
Authors
Vasiliki Vouloutsi
Maria Blancas
Riccardo Zucca
Pedro Omedas
Dennis Reidsma
Daniel Davison
Vicky Charisi
Frances Wijnen
Jan van der Meij
Vanessa Evers
David Cameron
Samuel Fernando
Roger Moore
Tony Prescott
Daniele Mazzei
Michael Pieroni
Lorenzo Cominelli
Roberto Garofalo
Danilo De Rossi
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Copyright Year
2016
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_32

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