Publications related to Virtual assistant

Fashioning Creative Expertise with Generative AI: Graphical Interfaces for GAN-Based Design Space Exploration Better Support Ideation Than Text Prompts for Diffusion Models

Pierre Dillenbourg, Richard Lee Davis, Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Kevin Gonyop Kim, Wei Jiang, Thiemo Wambsganss

This paper investigates the potential impact of deep generative models on the work of creative professionals. We argue that current generative modeling tools lack critical features that would make them useful creativity support tools, and introduce our own ...

2024

Generative AI-Enabled Conversational Interaction to Support Self-Directed Learning Experiences in Transversal Computational Thinking

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah, Adrian Christian Holzer, Abdessalam Ouaazki

As computational thinking (CT) becomes increasingly acknowledged as an important skill in education, self-directed learning (SDL) emerges as a key strategy for developing this capability. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) conversational agents has disrup ...

2024

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Conversational Agents in Digital Education

Juan Carlos Farah

The presence of conversational agents (or chatbots) in educational contexts has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Recent surveys have shown widespread interest in the use of chatbots in education, both for research and practice. Although th ...

EPFL2023

Empathetic Conversational Agents for Distress Support

Kalpani Anuradha Welivita

Due to the increasing demands of today's fast-paced world, mental health concerns are on the rise, which necessitates innovative approaches to provide support to those in need. Open-domain conversational agents known as chatbots, offer a unique opportunit ...

EPFL2023

Yes but.. Can ChatGPT Identify Entities in Historical Documents?

Emanuela Boros, Ahmed Hamdi

Large language models (LLMs) have been leveraged for several years now, obtaining state-of-the-art performance in recognizing entities from modern documents. For the last few months, the conversational agent ChatGPT has "prompted" a lot of interest in the ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Towards Novel Evaluation Methods for Social Dialog Systems

Ekaterina Svikhnushina

Language has shaped human evolution and led to the desire to endow machines with language abilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing enable us to achieve this breakthrough in human-machine interaction. However, introducing conversational ...

EPFL2023

Complex Daily Activities, Country-Level Diversity, and Smartphone Sensing: A Study in Denmark, Italy, Mongolia, Paraguay, and UK

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola, Karim Assi

Smartphones enable understanding human behavior with activity recognition to support peoples daily lives. Prior studies focused on using inertial sensors to detect simple activities (sitting, walking, running, etc.) and were mostly conducted in homogeneous ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Harnessing Rule-Based Chatbots to Support Teaching Python Programming Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah, Sandy Ingram, Adrian Christian Holzer

In recent years, the use of chatbots in education has been driven by advances in natural language processing and the increasing availability of digital education platforms. Although the added value of educational chatbots appears promising, researchers hav ...

Springer2023

Virtual Safety Assistant: An Efficient Tool for Ensuring Safety During Covid-19 Pandemic

Daniel Thalmann

Using intelligent virtual assistants for controlling employee population in workspaces is a research area that remains unexplored. This paper presents a novel application of virtual humans to enforce Covid-19 safety measures in a corporate workplace. For t ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2022

Challenges and Opportunities in Integrating Interactive Chatbots into Code Review Exercises: A Pilot Case Study

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah, Adrian Christian Holzer

While chatbots are commonly used to support software developers with repetitive tasks, their use in programming education is still limited, particularly for students in non-technical domains. To better understand the potential for chatbots to support progr ...

IATED2022

Towards Empathetic Open-Domain Chatbots

Yubo Xie

The research community of dialog generation has been interested in incorporating emotional information into the design of open-domain dialog systems ever since neural networks (sequence-to-sequence models in particular) were adopted for modeling dialogs. T ...

EPFL2022

Synthetic Disinformation Attacks on Automated Fact Verification Systems

Antoine Bosselut

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the reali ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2022

Impersonating Chatbots in a Code Review Exercise to Teach Software Engineering Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Maria Jesus Rodriguez Triana, Juan Carlos Farah, Sandy Ingram, Vandit Sharma

Over the past decade, the use of chatbots for educational purposes has gained considerable traction. A similar trend has been observed in social coding platforms, where automated agents support software developers with tasks such as performing code reviews ...

IEEE2022

Textual Explanations and Critiques in Recommendation Systems

Diego Matteo Antognini

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have become ubiquitous. Although they offer a wide range of benefits, their adoption in decision-critical fields is limited by their lack of interpretability, particularly with textual data. Moreover, ...

EPFL2022

Children, Robots, and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges

Shruti Chandra, Elmira Yadollahi

Research on child-agent interaction is rapidly expanding. It is, therefore, necessary to converge our collective efforts to broaden our understanding and perspectives of how virtual agents, affect and potentially improve the well-being of children. "Childr ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Fair Voice Biometrics: Impact of Demographic Imbalance on Group Fairness in Speaker Recognition

Mirko Marras

Speaker recognition systems are playing a key role in modern online applications. Though the susceptibility of these systems to discrimination according to group fairness metrics has been recently studied, their assessment has been mainly focused on the di ...

ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC2021

Building a Question-Answering Chatbot using Forum Data in the Semantic Space

Pierre Dillenbourg, Marc Laperrouza, Khalil Mrini

We build a conversational agent which knowledge base is an online forum for parents of autistic children. We collect about 35,000 threads totalling some 600,000 replies, and label 1% of them for usefulness using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We train a Random Fo ...

2018

Decoding Neural Correlates of Cognitive States to Enhance Driving Experience

Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Huaijian Zhang, Lucian Andrei Gheorghe, Sareh Saeedi, Zahra Khaliliardali, Marija Uscumlic, Ruslan Aydarkhanov

Modern cars can support their drivers by assessing and autonomously performing different driving maneuvers based on information gathered by in-car sensors. We propose that brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) can provide complementary information that can ease ...

2018

Supernumerary Robotic Arm for Three-Handed Surgical Application: Behavioral Study and Design of Human-Machine Interface

Elahe Abdi

In surgical to industrial manipulation, the operator needs assistance for tasks requiring more than two hands. Teamwork may be the source of errors and inefficiency, especially if the assistant is a novice or unfamiliar with the main operator. The need for ...

EPFL2017

Characterizing first and third person viewpoints and their alternation for embodied interaction in virtual reality

Olaf Blanke, Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Roy Salomon, Henrique Galvan Debarba, Sidney Bovet

Empirical research on the bodily self has shown that the body representation is malleable, and prone to manipulation when conflicting sensory stimuli are presented. Using Virtual Reality (VR) we assessed the effects of manipulating multisensory feedback (f ...

Public Library of Science2017