12:45 pm

Georgia Institute of Technology

Behavioral Imaging and the Analysis of Social Interactions

Abstract: Beginning in infancy, individuals acquire the social and communication skills that are vital for a healthy and productive life. Children with developmental delays face great challenges in acquiring these skills, resulting in substantial lifetime risks. Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represent a particularly significant risk category, due both to the increasing rate of diagnosis of ASD and its consequences. Since the genetic basis for ASD is unclear, the diagnosis, treatment, and study of the disorder depends fundamentally on the observation of behavior. In this talk, I will describe our research agenda in Behavioral Imaging, which targets the capture, modeling, and analysis of social and communicative behaviors between children and their caregivers and peers. We are developing computational methods and statistical models for the analysis of vision, audio, and wearable sensor data. I will present several recent findings, including a method for detecting eye contact between children and adults using wearable cameras, an approach to retrieving behaviors of interest in large video collections, and the audio-video analysis of paralinguistic events in young children’s speech. I will also describe our plans for clinical applications of this technology. This is joint work with Drs. Agata Rozga and Mark Clements, and Ph.D. students Eunji Chong, Arridhana Ciptadi, Yin Li, Hrishikesh Rao, and Zhefan Ye.

1:30 pm

Yale University

Teaching Social Skills with Social Robots

Abstract: In the last decade, there has been a slowly growing interaction between robotics researchers and clinicians to look at the viability of using robots as a tool for enhancing therapeutic and diagnostic options for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. While much of the early work in using robots for autism therapy lacked clinical rigor, new research is beginning to demonstrate that robots improve engagement and elicit novel social behaviors from people (particularly children and teenagers) with autism. However, why robots in particular show this capability, when similar interactions with other technology or with adults or peers fails to show this response, remains unknown. This talk will present some of the most recent evidence showing robots eliciting social behavior from individuals with autism and discuss some of the mechanisms by which these effects may be generated. As a diagnostic tool, robots offer a social press that is repeatable and controllable to allow for standardization of interactive stimuli across individuals and across time. Because robots can provide consistent, reliable actions, clinicians can ensure that identical stimuli are presented at each diagnostic session. Furthermore, the component systems in socially aware robots may offer non-interactive methods for tracking human- human social behaviors. The perceptual systems of these robots are designed to measure and quantify social behavior—that is, exactly the skills that must be identified during diagnosis.