Interactive Technologies for Autistic Children: A Review
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paper_title: Time-Scale Feature Extractions for Emotional Speech Characterization

paper_content:

Emotional speech characterization is an important issue for the understanding of interaction. This article discusses the time-scale analysis problem in feature extraction for emotional speech processing. We describe a computational framework for combining segmental and supra-segmental features for emotional speech detection. The statistical fusion is based on the estimation of local a posteriori class probabilities and the overall decision employs weighting factors directly related to the duration of the individual speech segments. This strategy is applied to a real-world application: detection of Italian motherese in authentic and longitudinal parent–infant interaction at home. The results suggest that short- and long-term information, respectively, represented by the short-term spectrum and the prosody parameters (fundamental frequency and energy) provide a robust and efficient time-scale analysis. A similar fusion methodology is also investigated by the use of a phonetic-specific characterization process. This strategy is motivated by the fact that there are variations across emotional states at the phoneme level. A time-scale based on both vowels and consonants is proposed and it provides a relevant and discriminant feature space for acted emotion recognition. The experimental results on two different databases Berlin (German) and Aholab (Basque) show that the best performance are obtained by our phoneme-dependent approach. These findings demonstrate the relevance of taking into account phoneme dependency (vowels/consonants) for emotional speech characterization.
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paper_title: How social robots will help us to diagnose , treat , and understand autism

paper_content:

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by social and communicative impairments. Social robots recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Social robots, and the technology used in their construction, can be unique tools in the study of autism. Based on three years of integration and immersion with a clinical research group, this paper discusses how social robots will make an impact on the ways in which we diagnose, treat, and understand autism.
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paper_title: Robust trajectory learning and approximation for robot programming by demonstration

paper_content:

Abstract Trajectory learning is a fundamental component in a robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD) system, where often the very purpose of the demonstration is to teach complex manipulation patterns. However, human demonstrations are inevitably noisy and inconsistent. This paper highlights the trajectory learning component of a PbD system for manipulation tasks encompassing the ability to cluster, select, and approximate human demonstrated trajectories. The proposed technique provides some advantages with respect to alternative approaches and is suitable for learning from both individual and multiple user demonstrations.
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paper_title: Computer mediated interaction in Asperger's syndrome: the Bubble Dialogue program

paper_content:

Abstract This paper reports the use of a computer application, Bubble Dialogue, with two primary aims: (1) to assess the experience of computer-mediated role-taking on the interpersonal understanding, executive abilities and verbal abilities of two young male adults with Asperger’s syndrome (a diagnosis given to higher functioning individuals with autism); (2) to investigate whether blind raters judged differently between Bubble Dialogue scripts produced by individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and scripts produced by individuals with emotional and behavioural difficulties. The results show that there was no detectable improvement in the interpersonal understanding of the participants with Asperger’s syndrome, but there was an improvement in their executive function scores. Additionally, the blind ratings revealed that only one of the ‘Asperger’ Bubble Dialogue scripts was different from the scripts generated by individuals with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Conceivably, Bubble Dialogue helps to regulate interaction, such that the social impairments characteristics of Asperger’s syndrome are less conspicuous.
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paper_title: The functional architecture of human empathy

paper_content:

Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experience of similarity between the feelings expressed by self and others without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state. In light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this article proposes a model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms. Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility, and emotion regulation constitute the basic macrocomponents of empathy, which are underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neu...
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paper_title: Behavioural and Developmental Interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Clinical Systematic Review

paper_content:

Background ::: Much controversy exists regarding the clinical efficacy of behavioural and developmental interventions for improving the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We conducted a systematic review to summarize the evidence on the effectiveness of behavioural and developmental interventions for ASD. ::: ::: ::: Methods and Findings ::: Comprehensive searches were conducted in 22 electronic databases through May 2007. Further information was obtained through hand searching journals, searching reference lists, databases of theses and dissertations, and contacting experts in the field. Experimental and observational analytic studies were included if they were written in English and reported the efficacy of any behavioural or developmental intervention for individuals with ASD. Two independent reviewers made the final study selection, extracted data, and reached consensus on study quality. Results were summarized descriptively and, where possible, meta-analyses of the study results were conducted. One-hundred-and-one studies at predominantly high risk of bias that reported inconsistent results across various interventions were included in the review. Meta-analyses of three controlled clinical trials showed that Lovaas treatment was superior to special education on measures of adaptive behaviour, communication and interaction, comprehensive language, daily living skills, expressive language, overall intellectual functioning and socialization. High-intensity Lovaas was superior to low-intensity Lovaas on measures of intellectual functioning in two retrospective cohort studies. Pooling the results of two randomized controlled trials favoured developmental approaches based on initiative interaction compared to contingency interaction in the amount of time spent in stereotyped behaviours and distal social behaviour, but the effect sizes were not clinically significant. No statistically significant differences were found for: Lovaas versus special education for non-verbal intellectual functioning; Lovaas versus Developmental Individual-difference relationship-based intervention for communication skills; computer assisted instruction versus no treatment for facial expression recognition; and TEACCH versus standard care for imitation skills and eye-hand integration. ::: ::: ::: Conclusions ::: While this review suggests that Lovaas may improve some core symptoms of ASD compared to special education, these findings are based on pooling of a few, methodologically weak studies with few participants and relatively short-term follow-up. As no definitive behavioural or developmental intervention improves all symptoms for all individuals with ASD, it is recommended that clinical management be guided by individual needs and availability of resources.
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paper_title: Trends and considerations in robot-assisted autism therapy

paper_content:

Recent research suggests that children with autism exhibit certain positive social behaviors while interacting with robots that are not observed while interacting with their peers, caregivers, and therapists. This paper explores trends in robot-assisted autism therapy, as well as some of the specific therapies that have been shown to elicit desirable social interactions when working with children with autism. Considerations for the design of robots for use in robot-assisted therapies are also presented. Finally, general conclusions and recommendations are made to help further the work of robot-assisted autism therapy.
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paper_title: Using Virtual Environments for Teaching Social Understanding to 6 Adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

Six teenagers with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) experienced a Virtual Environment (VE) of a cafe. They also watched three sets of videos of real cafes and buses and judged where they would sit and explained why. Half of the participants received their VE experience between the first and second sets of videos, and half experienced it between the second and third. Ten naive raters independently coded participants’ judgments and reasoning. In direct relation to the timing of VE use, there were several instances of significant improvement in judgments and explanations about where to sit, both in a video of a cafe and a bus. The results demonstrate the potential of Virtual Reality for teaching social skills.
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paper_title: Affective Computing and Autism

paper_content:

: This article highlights the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing. We propose that a collaboration between autism research and affective computing could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes—from developing new tools to assist people with autism in understanding and operating in the socioemotional world around them, to developing new computational models and theories that will enable technology to be modified to provide an overall better socioemotional experience to all people who use it. This article describes work toward this convergence at the MIT Media Lab, and anticipates new research that might arise from the interaction between research into autism, technology, and human socioemotional intelligence.
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paper_title: Teaching Children with Autism to Mind-Read: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Parents

paper_content:

Teaching About Emotions. Teaching About Informational States. Developing Pretend Play. Future Directions.
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paper_title: The eyes have it : the neuroethology , function and evolution of social gaze

paper_content:

Abstract Gaze is an important component of social interaction. The function, evolution and neurobiology of gaze processing are therefore of interest to a number of researchers. This review discusses the evolutionary role of social gaze in vertebrates (focusing on primates), and a hypothesis that this role has changed substantially for primates compared to other animals. This change may have been driven by morphological changes to the face and eyes of primates, limitations in the facial anatomy of other vertebrates, changes in the ecology of the environment in which primates live, and a necessity to communicate information about the environment, emotional and mental states. The eyes represent different levels of signal value depending on the status, disposition and emotional state of the sender and receiver of such signals. There are regions in the monkey and human brain which contain neurons that respond selectively to faces, bodies and eye gaze. The ability to follow another individual's gaze direction is affected in individuals with autism and other psychopathological disorders, and after particular localized brain lesions. The hypothesis that gaze following is “hard-wired” in the brain, and may be localized within a circuit linking the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex is discussed.
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paper_title: A proposed framework of an interactive semi-virtual environment for enhanced education of children with autism spectrum disorders

paper_content:

Education of people with special needs has recently been considered as a key element in the field of medical education. Recent development in the area of information and communication technologies may enable development of collaborative interactive environments which facilitate early stage education and provide specialists with robust tools indicating the person's autism spectrum disorder level. Towards the goal of establishing an enhanced learning environment for children with autism this paper attempts to provide a framework of a semi-controlled real-world environment used for the daily education of an autistic person according to the scenarios selected by the specialists. The proposed framework employs both real-world objects and virtual environments equipped with humanoids able to provide emotional feedback and to demonstrate empathy. Potential examples and usage scenarios for such environments are also described.
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paper_title: A survey of socially interactive robots

paper_content:

This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002]. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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paper_title: Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind

paper_content:

An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory because such states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others. As to the mental states the chimpanzee may infer, consider those inferred by our own species, for example, purpose or intention , as well as knowledge, belief, thinking, doubt, guessing, pretending, liking , and so forth. To determine whether or not the chimpanzee infers states of this kind, we showed an adult chimpanzee a series of videotaped scenes of a human actor struggling with a variety of problems. Some problems were simple, involving inaccessible food – bananas vertically or horizontally out of reach, behind a box, and so forth – as in the original Kohler problems; others were more complex, involving an actor unable to extricate himself from a locked cage, shivering because of a malfunctioning heater, or unable to play a phonograph because it was unplugged. With each videotape the chimpanzee was given several photographs, one a solution to the problem, such as a stick for the inaccessible bananas, a key for the locked up actor, a lit wick for the malfunctioning heater. The chimpanzee's consistent choice of the correct photographs can be understood by assuming that the animal recognized the videotape as representing a problem, understood the actor's purpose, and chose alternatives compatible with that purpose.
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paper_title: Constructing an understanding of mind: the development of children's social understanding within social interaction.

paper_content:

Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction.
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paper_title: Neuropsychological profile in high functioning autism spectrum disorders.

paper_content:

A comprehensive investigation of the neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of children with autism may help to better describe their cognitive abilities and to design appropriate interventions. To this end we compared the NEPSY-II profiles of 22 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) with those of 44 healthy control (HC) children 2:1 matched by gender, age, race and education. Results showed that only Visuospatial Processing was relatively spared in HFASD, while deficits were observed in Attention and Executive Functions, Language, Learning and Memory, and Sensorimotor Processing. Theory of Mind difficulties were observed in verbal tasks but not in the understanding of emotional contexts, suggesting that appropriate contextual cues might help emotion understanding in HFASD children. These widespread neuropsychological impairments reflect alterations in multiple cognitive domains in HFASD.
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paper_title: ‘ Obsessions ’ in children with autism or Asperger Syndrome : a content analysis in terms of core domains of cognition

paper_content:

BACKGROUND We report a survey of the content of obsessions in children with autism spectrum conditions. We use the term 'obsessions' narrowly, to indicate strong, repetitive interests. We predicted that obsessions would not cluster randomly, but rather would occur significantly more often in the domain of 'folk physics' (an interest in how things work), and significantly less often in the domain of 'folk psychology' (an interest in how people work). These predictions were tested relative to a control group of 33 children with Tourette syndrome. ::: ::: AIMS To examine the content of autistic obsessions, and to test the theory that these reflect an evolved cognitive style of good folk physics alongside impaired folk psychology. ::: ::: METHOD Ninety-two parents returned a questionnaire designed to determine the subject of their child's obsessional interests. The results were analysed in terms of core domains of cognition. ::: ::: RESULTS Both predictions were confirmed. ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that impaired folk psychology and superior folk physics are part of the cognitive phenotype of autism. A content-free theory of obsessions is inadequate.
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paper_title: Multimedia and Virtual Reality in the Rehabilitation of Autistic Children

paper_content:

At present autism is beyond recovery, thus the only way that autistic children can adapt themselves to grown-up life is rehabilitation. As the application of computers becomes more and more general in teaching healthy children so does it in teaching children with learning disabilities. Thence a multimedia and virtual reality software package was designed for the rehabilitation of autistic children. This paper presents the developed programs and the results of their usability test.
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paper_title: Multimedia Program for Teaching Autistic Children

paper_content:

Autism is an incurable neurological disease. The main symptoms of this disease are problems with communication and social behaviour. There are difficulties with integration of sensory impressions, too [1]. Nowadays, the only way of solving the problem of autism is rehabilitation, the aim of which is for an autistic person to achieve the best level of functioning in a society.
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paper_title: Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions: An Intervention Using Animated Vehicles with Real Emotional Faces

paper_content:

This study evaluated The Transporters, an animated series designed to enhance emotion comprehension in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). n = 20 children with ASC (aged 4–7) watched The Transporters everyday for 4 weeks. Participants were tested before and after intervention on emotional vocabulary and emotion recognition at three levels of generalization. Two matched control groups of children (ASC group, n = 18 and typically developing group, n = 18) were also assessed twice without any intervention. The intervention group improved significantly more than the clinical control group on all task levels, performing comparably to typical controls at Time 2. We conclude that using The Transporters significantly improves emotion recognition in children with ASC. Future research should evaluate the series’ effectiveness with lower-functioning individuals.
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paper_title: Use of an iPad Play Story to Increase Play Dialogue of Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

An iPad play story was utilized to increase the pretend play skills of 4 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. The story utilized a series of video clips depicting toy figures producing scripted character dialogue, engaged in a pretend play vignette. A multiple baseline design across participants was utilized with play dialogue as the dependent variable. Three of the participants demonstrated increases in the target behavior with Nonoverlap of All Pairs analysis revealing moderate and strong effects across intervention phases. Effects were largely maintained during generalization opportunities with peers and during a 3-week follow-up condition.
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paper_title: Brief report: Two case studies using virtual reality as a learning tool for autistic children

paper_content:

The children complied with most requests. Some of our teaching goals were limited by technology or space while others were limited by the difficulty of presenting a task to the children in a way that was understandable within their environment. However, the opportunity to introduce this technology to children was an important first step in exploring the potential VR offers to understanding the perceptual processes involved in autism.
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paper_title: Smart ambience games for children with learning difficulties

paper_content:

Smart Ambience Games (or SAG) combines interactive media with smart ambience technologies to create a motivating environment for children with learning difficulties to overcome barriers in art education. Through a development of innovative motion and gesture capture and detection techniques, we create a smart ambience that enables students to interact intuitively with a virtual environment to create a rich variety of multimedia forms and space without the use of specific physical tools. Through various interactive activities and game scenarios, particular subjects such as history and mathematics can be taught through developed VR games that can help students to overcome inhibitions related to learning, become more active learners and stimulate creativity in art education.
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paper_title: Using iPods(®) and iPads(®) in teaching programs for individuals with developmental disabilities: a systematic review.

paper_content:

Abstract We conducted a systematic review of studies that involved iPods ® , iPads ® , and related devices (e.g., iPhones ® ) in teaching programs for individuals with developmental disabilities. The search yielded 15 studies covering five domains: (a) academic, (b) communication, (c) employment, (d) leisure, and (e) transitioning across school settings. The 15 studies reported outcomes for 47 participants, who ranged from 4 to 27 years of age and had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or intellectual disability. Most studies involved the use of iPods ® or iPads ® and aimed to either (a) deliver instructional prompts via the iPod Touch ® or iPad ® , or (b) teach the person to operate an iPod Touch ® or iPad ® to access preferred stimuli. The latter also included operating an iPod Touch ® or an iPad ® as a speech-generating device (SGD) to request preferred stimuli. The results of these 15 studies were largely positive, suggesting that iPods ® , iPod Touch ® , iPads ® , and related devices are viable technological aids for individuals with developmental disabilities.
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paper_title: A Comparison of Communication Using the Apple iPad and a Picture-based System

paper_content:

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions have been shown to improve both communication and social skills in children and youth with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities. AAC applications have become available for personal devices such as cell phones, MP3 Players, and personal computer tablets. It is critical that these new forms of AAC are explored and evaluated. The purpose of this study was to investigate the utility of the Apple iPad™ as a communication device by comparing its use to a communication system using picture cards. Five elementary students with autism spectrum disorders and developmental disabilities who used a picture card system participated in the study. The results were mixed; communication behaviors either increased when using the iPad or remained the same as when using picture cards. The implications of these findings are discussed.
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paper_title: Using videogames in special education

paper_content:

Consideration has arisen on the use of video games as learning tools since they are deemed as active elements in classrooms. New game technologies have helped creating alternative strategies to increase cognitive skills in the field of Special Education. This paper describes our experience in video games design and in new forms of human-computer interaction addressed to develop didactic games for children with communication problems such as autism, dysphasia, ictus or some types of cerebral paralysis.
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paper_title: Using an iPad-based video modelling package to teach numeracy skills to a child with an autism spectrum disorder

paper_content:

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of a video modelling package to teach a 5 year-old boy diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) basic numeracy skills. The treatment package consisted of iPad-based video modelling, gradual fading of video prompts, reinforcement, in vivo prompting and forward chaining.Methods: A single subject multiple baseline across numerals design with generalization and maintenance observational measures.Results: Clear gains were evident in the participant's ability to identify and write the Arabic numerals 1–7 and comprehend the quantity each numeral represents in association with the lagged intervention. Generalization and maintenance data demonstrated the robustness of the treatment effects.Conclusions: IPad-based video modelling, when used in a package, can be an effective technique for teaching numeracy skills to children with an ASD. Systematic replication of this study with different participants is warranted.
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paper_title: Virtual Reality in Pediatric Neurorehabilitation: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism and Cerebral Palsy

paper_content:

This paper presents the current status and use of virtual reality (VR) for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism and cerebral palsy. This literature review explores how VR systems have been used as treatment tools to address the primary impairments of these disorders. Three major classes of VR display systems are identified that can be characterized by the type of human-computer interaction provided: (1) feedback-focused interaction, (2) gesture-based interaction, and (3) haptic-based interaction. The demonstrated effectiveness and potential effectiveness of each class are discussed in the context of remediating the primary impairments of children with ADHD, autism and cerebral palsy. Three major themes for future research are discussed to support continued research interest in using VR in pediatric neurorehabilitation.
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paper_title: Brief report: Two case studies using virtual reality as a learning tool for autistic children

paper_content:

The children complied with most requests. Some of our teaching goals were limited by technology or space while others were limited by the difficulty of presenting a task to the children in a way that was understandable within their environment. However, the opportunity to introduce this technology to children was an important first step in exploring the potential VR offers to understanding the perceptual processes involved in autism.
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paper_title: Using Virtual Environments for Teaching Social Understanding to 6 Adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

Six teenagers with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) experienced a Virtual Environment (VE) of a cafe. They also watched three sets of videos of real cafes and buses and judged where they would sit and explained why. Half of the participants received their VE experience between the first and second sets of videos, and half experienced it between the second and third. Ten naive raters independently coded participants’ judgments and reasoning. In direct relation to the timing of VE use, there were several instances of significant improvement in judgments and explanations about where to sit, both in a video of a cafe and a bus. The results demonstrate the potential of Virtual Reality for teaching social skills.
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paper_title: Virtual reality in autism: state of the art

paper_content:

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by core deficits with regard to three domains, i.e. social interaction, communication and repetitive or stereotypic behaviour. It is crucial to develop intervention strategies helping individuals with autism, their caregivers and educators in daily life. For this purpose, virtual reality (VR), i.e. a simulation of the real world based on computer graphics, can be useful as it allows instructors and therapists to offer a safe, repeatable and diversifiable environment during learning. This mini review examines studies that have investigated the use of VR in autism.
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paper_title: Virtual environments for social skills training: comments from two adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder

paper_content:

Previous research has shown that computer-based tasks can motivate people with autism and encourage learning. As a computer-based medium, Virtual Environments (VEs) offer a potentially useful tool for social skills training for people with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). However, there are some concerns over whether people with ASDs can understand, use and interpret the technology appropriately. This paper adopts a qualitative case-study approach to report observations of, and comments from, two adolescent boys with ASDs, gathered during a series of sessions using a virtual cafe and bus environment. Although there were signs of repetitive behaviours, literal interpretation of the scenes, and that the VEs were treated as not having real-world relevance, these were not the dominant modes of responding. Instead, participants seemed to interpret the scenes meaningfully and appreciated the opportunities to discuss appropriate social responses with a facilitator sitting alongside. They enjoyed using the VEs and provided specific examples of how the VEs had helped, or could help, them in the real world. This gives encouraging support for the idea that VEs can be used and interpreted meaningfully by at least some students with ASDs. The paper concludes with some considerations for the future development of VEs for members of this population.
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paper_title: A proposed framework of an interactive semi-virtual environment for enhanced education of children with autism spectrum disorders

paper_content:

Education of people with special needs has recently been considered as a key element in the field of medical education. Recent development in the area of information and communication technologies may enable development of collaborative interactive environments which facilitate early stage education and provide specialists with robust tools indicating the person's autism spectrum disorder level. Towards the goal of establishing an enhanced learning environment for children with autism this paper attempts to provide a framework of a semi-controlled real-world environment used for the daily education of an autistic person according to the scenarios selected by the specialists. The proposed framework employs both real-world objects and virtual environments equipped with humanoids able to provide emotional feedback and to demonstrate empathy. Potential examples and usage scenarios for such environments are also described.
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paper_title: Development of social skills amongst adults with Asperger's Syndrome using virtual environments: the 'AS Interactive' project

paper_content:

People with High-Functioning Autism, or Asperger's Syndrome (AS), are characterised by significantly impaired social understanding. Virtual environments may provide the ideal method for social skills training because many of the confusing inputs in 'real world' interactions can be removed. This paper outlines the rationale and methodology of the AS Interactive project. This multidisciplinary project incorporates a user-centred design and aims to develop and evaluate the use of virtual environments to support and enhance social skills amongst adults with AS. The potential for the use of Collaborative virtual environments for developing social awareness is also discussed.
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paper_title: Understanding How Adolescents with Autism Respond to Facial Expressions in Virtual Reality Environments

paper_content:

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by atypical patterns of behaviors and impairments in social communication. Among the fundamental social impairments in the ASD population are challenges in appropriately recognizing and responding to facial expressions. Traditional intervention approaches often require intensive support and well-trained therapists to address core deficits, with many with ASD having tremendous difficulty accessing such care due to lack of available trained therapists as well as intervention costs. As a result, emerging technology such as virtual reality (VR) has the potential to offer useful technology-enabled intervention systems. In this paper, an innovative VR-based facial emotional expression presentation system was developed that allows monitoring of eye gaze and physiological signals related to emotion identification to explore new efficient therapeutic paradigms. A usability study of this new system involving ten adolescents with ASD and ten typically developing adolescents as a control group was performed. The eye tracking and physiological data were analyzed to determine intragroup and intergroup variations of gaze and physiological patterns. Performance data, eye tracking indices and physiological features indicated that there were differences in the way adolescents with ASD process and recognize emotional faces compared to their typically developing peers. These results will be used in the future for an online adaptive VR-based multimodal social interaction system to improve emotion recognition abilities of individuals with ASD.
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paper_title: Computer mediated interaction in Asperger's syndrome: the Bubble Dialogue program

paper_content:

Abstract This paper reports the use of a computer application, Bubble Dialogue, with two primary aims: (1) to assess the experience of computer-mediated role-taking on the interpersonal understanding, executive abilities and verbal abilities of two young male adults with Asperger’s syndrome (a diagnosis given to higher functioning individuals with autism); (2) to investigate whether blind raters judged differently between Bubble Dialogue scripts produced by individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and scripts produced by individuals with emotional and behavioural difficulties. The results show that there was no detectable improvement in the interpersonal understanding of the participants with Asperger’s syndrome, but there was an improvement in their executive function scores. Additionally, the blind ratings revealed that only one of the ‘Asperger’ Bubble Dialogue scripts was different from the scripts generated by individuals with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Conceivably, Bubble Dialogue helps to regulate interaction, such that the social impairments characteristics of Asperger’s syndrome are less conspicuous.
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paper_title: Typical Emotion Processing for Cartoon but not for Real Faces in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

This study evaluated whether atypical face processing in autism extends from human to cartoon faces for which they show a greater interest. Twenty children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) were compared to two groups of typically developing children, matched on chronological and mental age. They processed the emotional expressions of real faces, human cartoon and non-human cartoon faces. Children with ASD were as capable as controls in processing emotional expressions, but strategies differed according to the type of face. Controls relied on a configural strategy with all faces. By contrast, ASD children exploited this typical configural strategy with cartoons but used a local strategy with real faces. This atypical visual processing style is discussed in the context of face expertise.
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paper_title: A proposed framework of an interactive semi-virtual environment for enhanced education of children with autism spectrum disorders

paper_content:

Education of people with special needs has recently been considered as a key element in the field of medical education. Recent development in the area of information and communication technologies may enable development of collaborative interactive environments which facilitate early stage education and provide specialists with robust tools indicating the person's autism spectrum disorder level. Towards the goal of establishing an enhanced learning environment for children with autism this paper attempts to provide a framework of a semi-controlled real-world environment used for the daily education of an autistic person according to the scenarios selected by the specialists. The proposed framework employs both real-world objects and virtual environments equipped with humanoids able to provide emotional feedback and to demonstrate empathy. Potential examples and usage scenarios for such environments are also described.
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paper_title: Avatar Assistant: Improving Social Skills in Students with an ASD Through a Computer-Based Intervention

paper_content:

This study assessed the efficacy of FaceSay, a computer-based social skills training program for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This randomized controlled study (N = 49) indicates that providing children with low-functioning autism (LFA) and high functioning autism (HFA) opportunities to practice attending to eye gaze, discriminating facial expressions and recognizing faces and emotions in FaceSay’s structured environment with interactive, realistic avatar assistants improved their social skills abilities. The children with LFA demonstrated improvements in two areas of the intervention: emotion recognition and social interactions. The children with HFA demonstrated improvements in all three areas: facial recognition, emotion recognition, and social interactions. These findings, particularly the measured improvements to social interactions in a natural environment, are encouraging.
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paper_title: Facial Synthesys of 3D Avatars for Therapeutic Applications.

paper_content:

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) find it difficult to recognize and respond to emotions conveyed by the face. Most existing methodologies to teach people with ASD to recognize expressions use still images, and do not take into account that facial expressions have movement. We propose a new approach that uses state of the art technology to solve the problem and to improve interactivity. It is based on an avatar-user interaction model with real time response, which builds upon the patient-therapist relationship: it is designed to be used by the therapist and the patient. The core technology behind it is based on a technique we have developed for real time facial synthesis of 3D characters.
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paper_title: Transcoding Biomedical Information Resources for Mobile Handhelds

paper_content:

We developed a transcoder gateway that transforms web pages on the fly. The transcoder adapts the pages to the limitation of the user's device, especially the small screen of PDAs and smart phones. We developed novel template-matching algorithms to detect the structure of a webpage and to match the structure with a known template in the template library. Transformation rules such as summarization can then be applied to the template to make reading full-text documents in small screen devices more usable. Our current project focuses on transcoding full-text biomedical information resources (such as full-text biomedical journals) to support mobile healthcare professionals.
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paper_title: A telerehabilitation approach to delivery of constraint-induced movement therapy

paper_content:

We have developed a device called AutoCITE (Automated Constraint-Induced Therapy Extension) that automates the intensive training component of constraint-induced (CI) movement therapy, also known as CI therapy. This study evaluated the effectiveness of AutoCITE training in a telerehabilitation setting when supervised remotely and with only intermittent interaction with a therapist. Seven participants with chronic stroke trained with AutoCITE for 3 h/d for 10 consecutive weekdays. The therapist supervised the training from a different room in the clinic using remote control of the AutoCITE computer and teleconferencing equipment when needed. Treatment gains on the Motor Activity Log were quite large (p < 0.001, d' = 3), while gains on the Wolf Motor Function Test and the Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test were large (p < 0.05, d' > 0.9). Gains were comparable in size with those previously reported for participants who received equal intensities of directly supervised AutoCITE training or standard one-on-one CI therapy without the device.
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paper_title: Telerehabilitation research: emerging opportunities.

paper_content:

▪ Abstract The field of clinical rehabilitation is rooted in the premise that carefully planned and delivered therapeutic intervention enhances patient outcomes. Underlying this statement is a deeper scientific reality: The field exists because biosystems (e.g., tissues, cells, organs, persons) are inherently adaptive and can dynamically change as a function of a sequence of inputs (e.g., exercise, pharmaceuticals). The tools of telerehabilitation help minimize the barrier of distance, both of patients to rehabilitative services and of researchers to subject populations. This enhanced access opens up new possibilities for discovering and implementing optimized intervention strategies across the continuum of care. Telecommunications technologies are reviewed from the perspective of systems models of the telerehabilitation process, with a focus on human-technology interface design and a special emphasis on emerging home and mobile technologies. Approaches for providing clinical rehabilitation services throu...
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paper_title: Telerehabilitation, cognition and user-accessibility

paper_content:

Survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) often experience cognitive and physical impairments. The aims of this study were to: 1) build an internet-based, "Virtual Rehabilitation Center" (VRC) that provides rehabilitation, education and support services to individuals with TBI; and 2) to determine the relationships between the nature and severity of the participants' cognitive impairments and their ability to use the VRC. Eight individuals with brain injuries (Age: M=43, SD=15.4; Years of Education: M=13.8, SD=3.15) participated. The Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Exam (NBCSE) was used to assess intellectual functioning. The VRC modules consisted of reaction time, functional modules, and communication capabilities. All participants learned how to use the VRC. However, those requiring more "trials to acquisition" showed greater cognitive impairment than those requiring fewer trials in: Construction (p=0.02), Reasoning-Similarities (p=0.01) and in calculation and language repetition.(i.e., a non-significant trend). Importantly, all participants learned how to use the system although learning rates varied. Moreover, one case-study demonstrated that learning on the VRC generalized to the community. Overall, impairments on the NBCSE in visual-constructional integration and executive-type functions, as well as language processing appeared to be related to how effectively participants learned how to use the VRC.
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paper_title: Randomized, controlled trial of an intervention for toddlers with autism: the Early Start Denver Model.

paper_content:

OBJECTIVE ::: To conduct a randomized, controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention, for improving outcomes of toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: Forty-eight children diagnosed with ASD between 18 and 30 months of age were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: (1) ESDM intervention, which is based on developmental and applied behavioral analytic principles and delivered by trained therapists and parents for 2 years; or (2) referral to community providers for intervention commonly available in the community. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Compared with children who received community-intervention, children who received ESDM showed significant improvements in IQ, adaptive behavior, and autism diagnosis. Two years after entering intervention, the ESDM group on average improved 17.6 standard score points (1 SD: 15 points) compared with 7.0 points in the comparison group relative to baseline scores. The ESDM group maintained its rate of growth in adaptive behavior compared with a normative sample of typically developing children. In contrast, over the 2-year span, the comparison group showed greater delays in adaptive behavior. Children who received ESDM also were more likely to experience a change in diagnosis from autism to pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, than the comparison group. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This is the first randomized, controlled trial to demonstrate the efficacy of a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention for toddlers with ASD for improving cognitive and adaptive behavior and reducing severity of ASD diagnosis. Results of this study underscore the importance of early detection of and intervention in autism.
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paper_title: Use of an iPad Play Story to Increase Play Dialogue of Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

An iPad play story was utilized to increase the pretend play skills of 4 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. The story utilized a series of video clips depicting toy figures producing scripted character dialogue, engaged in a pretend play vignette. A multiple baseline design across participants was utilized with play dialogue as the dependent variable. Three of the participants demonstrated increases in the target behavior with Nonoverlap of All Pairs analysis revealing moderate and strong effects across intervention phases. Effects were largely maintained during generalization opportunities with peers and during a 3-week follow-up condition.
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paper_title: How social robots will help us to diagnose , treat , and understand autism

paper_content:

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by social and communicative impairments. Social robots recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Social robots, and the technology used in their construction, can be unique tools in the study of autism. Based on three years of integration and immersion with a clinical research group, this paper discusses how social robots will make an impact on the ways in which we diagnose, treat, and understand autism.
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paper_title: Multimedia and Virtual Reality in the Rehabilitation of Autistic Children

paper_content:

At present autism is beyond recovery, thus the only way that autistic children can adapt themselves to grown-up life is rehabilitation. As the application of computers becomes more and more general in teaching healthy children so does it in teaching children with learning disabilities. Thence a multimedia and virtual reality software package was designed for the rehabilitation of autistic children. This paper presents the developed programs and the results of their usability test.
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paper_title: An Approach to the Design of Socially Acceptable Robots for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

paper_content:

Investigation into technology-assisted intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has gained momentum in recent years. Research suggests that robots could be a viable means to impart skills to this population since children with ASD tend to be fascinated by robots. However, if robots are to be used to impart social skills, a primary deficit for this population, considerable attention needs to be paid to aspects of social acceptability of such robots. Currently there are no design guidelines as to how to develop socially acceptable robots to be used for intervention for children with ASD. As a first step, this work investigates social design of virtual robots for children with ASD. In this paper we describe the design of a virtual environment system for social interaction (VESSI). The design is evaluated through an innovative experiment plan that combines subjective ratings from a clinical observer with physiological responses indicative of affective states from the participants, both collected when participants engage in social tasks with the social robots in a virtual reality environment. Two social parameters of importance for this population, namely eye gaze and social distance, are systematically varied to analyze the response of the participants. The results are presented to illustrate how experiments with virtual social robots can contribute towards the development of future social robots for children with ASD.
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paper_title: A survey of socially interactive robots

paper_content:

This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002]. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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paper_title: The Clinical Use of Robots for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Critical Review.

paper_content:

Abstract We examined peer-reviewed studies in order to understand the current status of empirically based evidence on the clinical applications of robots in the diagnosis and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Studies are organized into four broad categories: (a) the response of individuals with ASD to robots or robot-like behavior in comparison to human behavior, (b) the use of robots to elicit behaviors, (c) the use of robots to model, teach, and/or practice a skill, and (d) the use of robots to provide feedback on performance. A critical review of the literature revealed that most of the findings are exploratory and have methodological limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the clinical utility of robots. Finally, we outline the research needed to determine the incremental validity of this technique.
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paper_title: SOCIAL COGNITION, JOINT ATTENTION, AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE FROM 9 TO 15 MONTHS OF AGE

paper_content:

The studies in this volume measure the various behaviours that are displayed as infants and mothers share their attention on an outside object: joint engagement, following gazes and points, gestures, imitation of actions, and language comprehension and production. The authors show how infants follow a progression from "sharing" to "following" to "directing" others' attention and behaviour, and how these skills are related to early communicative competence. Their results have important implications for theories of social-cognitive and language development.
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paper_title: Joint Attention and Early Language.

paper_content:

TOMASELLO, MICHAEL, and FARRAR, MICHAEL JEFFREY. Joint Attention and Early Language. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 1454-1463. This paper reports 2 studies that explore the role ofjoint attentional processes in the child's acquisition of language. In the first study, 24 children were videotaped at 15 and 21 months of age in naturalistic interaction with their mothers. Episodes of joint attentional focus between mother and child-for example, joint play with an object-were identified. Inside, as opposed to outside, these episodes both mothers and children produced more utterances, mothers used shorter sentences and more comments, and dyads engaged in longer conversations. Inside joint episodes maternal references to objects that were already the child's focus of attention were positively correlated with the child's vocabulary at 21 months, while object references that attempted to redirect the child's attention were negatively correlated. No measures from outside these episodes related to child language. In an experimental study, an adult attempted to teach novel words to 10 17-month-old children. Words referring to objects on which the child's attention was already focused were learned better than words presented in an attempt to redirect the child's attentional focus.
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paper_title: Robots for Use in Autism Research

paper_content:

Autism spectrum disorders are a group of lifelong disabilities that affect people's ability to communicate and to understand social cues. Research into applying robots as therapy tools has shown that robots seem to improve engagement and elicit novel social behaviors from people (particularly children and teenagers) with autism. Robot therapy for autism has been explored as one of the first application domains in the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR), which aims to develop robots that assist people with special needs through social interactions. In this review, we discuss the past decade's work in SAR systems designed for autism therapy by analyzing robot design decisions, human-robot interactions, and system evaluations. We conclude by discussing challenges and future trends for this young but rapidly developing research area.
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paper_title: Randomized, controlled trial of an intervention for toddlers with autism: the Early Start Denver Model.

paper_content:

OBJECTIVE ::: To conduct a randomized, controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention, for improving outcomes of toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: Forty-eight children diagnosed with ASD between 18 and 30 months of age were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: (1) ESDM intervention, which is based on developmental and applied behavioral analytic principles and delivered by trained therapists and parents for 2 years; or (2) referral to community providers for intervention commonly available in the community. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Compared with children who received community-intervention, children who received ESDM showed significant improvements in IQ, adaptive behavior, and autism diagnosis. Two years after entering intervention, the ESDM group on average improved 17.6 standard score points (1 SD: 15 points) compared with 7.0 points in the comparison group relative to baseline scores. The ESDM group maintained its rate of growth in adaptive behavior compared with a normative sample of typically developing children. In contrast, over the 2-year span, the comparison group showed greater delays in adaptive behavior. Children who received ESDM also were more likely to experience a change in diagnosis from autism to pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, than the comparison group. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This is the first randomized, controlled trial to demonstrate the efficacy of a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention for toddlers with ASD for improving cognitive and adaptive behavior and reducing severity of ASD diagnosis. Results of this study underscore the importance of early detection of and intervention in autism.
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paper_title: Teaching and learning of robot tasks via observation of human performance

paper_content:

Abstract Within this paper, an approach for teaching a humanoid robot is presented that will enable the robot to learn typical tasks required in everyday household environments. Our approach, called Programming by Demonstration, which is implemented and successfully used in our institute to teach a robot system is presented. Firstly, we concentrate on an analysis of human actions and action sequences that can be identified when watching a human demonstrator. Secondly, sensor aid systems are introduced which augment the robot’s perception capabilities while watching a human’s demonstration and the robot’s execution of tasks respectively. The main focus is then layed on the knowledge representation in order to be able to abstract the problem solution strategies and to transfer them onto the robot system.
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paper_title: Robust trajectory learning and approximation for robot programming by demonstration

paper_content:

Abstract Trajectory learning is a fundamental component in a robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD) system, where often the very purpose of the demonstration is to teach complex manipulation patterns. However, human demonstrations are inevitably noisy and inconsistent. This paper highlights the trajectory learning component of a PbD system for manipulation tasks encompassing the ability to cluster, select, and approximate human demonstrated trajectories. The proposed technique provides some advantages with respect to alternative approaches and is suitable for learning from both individual and multiple user demonstrations.
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paper_title: Learning of Social Signatures Through Imitation Game Between a Robot and a Human Partner

paper_content:

In this paper, a robot learns different postures by imitating several partners. We assessed the effect of the type of partners, i.e., adults, typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), on robot learning during an imitation game. The experimental protocol was divided into two phases: (1) a learning phase, during which the robot produced a random posture and the partner imitated the robot; and (2) a phase in which the roles were reversed and the robot had to imitate the posture of the human partner. Robot learning was based on a sensory-motor architecture whereby neural networks (N.N.) enabled the robot to associate what it did with what it saw. Several metrics (i.e., annotation, the number of neurons needed to learn, and normalized mutual information) were used to show that the partners affected robot learning. The first result obtained was that learning was easier with adults than with both groups of children, indicating a developmental effect. Second, learning was more complex with children with ASD compared to both adults and TD children. Third, learning with the more complex partner first (i.e., children with ASD) enabled learning to be more easily generalized.
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paper_title: A constructive model for the development of joint attention

paper_content:

This paper presents a constructive model by which a robot acquires the ability of joint attention with a human caregiver based on its embedded mechanisms of visual attention and learning with self-evaluation. The former is to look at a salient object in the robot's view, and the latter is to learn sensorimotor co-ordination when visual attention has succeeded. Since the success of visual attention does not always correspond to the success of joint attention, the robot has incorrect learning data for joint attention as well as correct data. However, the robot is expected statistically to lose incorrect data as outliers since such data do not have any correlation in the sensorimotor co-ordination while correct data have a correlation. The robot consequently acquires the ability of joint attention by finding the correlation in the sensorimotor co-ordination even if multiple objects are placed at random positions in an environment and a human caregiver does not provide any task evaluation to the robot. The experimental results show that the proposed model makes the robot reproduce the developmental process of infants' joint attention. Therefore, the proposed model could be one of the models to explain how infants develop the ability of joint attention.
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paper_title: The Challenges of Joint Attention

paper_content:

This article discusses the concept of joint attention and the different skills underlying its development. Research in developmental psychology clearly states that the development of skills to understand, manipulate and coordinate attentional behavior plays a pivotal role for imitation, social cognition and the development of language. However, beside the fact that joint attention has recently received an increasing interest in the robotics community, existing models concentrate only on partial and isolated elements of these phenomena. In the line of Tomasello’s research, we argue that joint attention is much more than simultaneous looking because it implies a shared intentional relation to the world. This requires skills for attention detection, attention manipulation, social coordination and, most importantly, intentional understanding. After defining joint attention and its challenges, the current state-of-the-art of robotic and computational models relevant for this issue is discussed in relation to a developmental timeline drawn from results in child studies. From this survey, we identify open issues and challenges that still need to be addressed to understand the development of the various aspects of joint attention and conclude with the potential contribution of robotic models.
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paper_title: A Robot Learns the Facial Expressions Recognition and Face/Non-face Discrimination Through an Imitation Game

paper_content:

In this paper, we show that a robotic system can learn online to recognize facial expressions without having a teaching signal associating a facial expression with a given abstract label (e.g., ‘sadness’, ‘happiness’). Moreover, we show that recognizing a face from a non-face can be accomplished autonomously if we imagine that learning to recognize a face occurs after learning to recognize a facial expression, and not the opposite, as it is classically considered. In these experiments, the robot is considered as a baby because we want to understand how the baby can develop some abilities autonomously. We model, test and analyze cognitive abilities through robotic experiments. Our starting point was a mathematical model showing that, if the baby uses a sensory motor architecture for the recognition of a facial expression, then the parents must imitate the baby’s facial expression to allow the online learning. Here, a first series of robotic experiments shows that a simple neural network model can control a robot head and can learn online to recognize the facial expressions of the human partner if he/she imitates the robot’s prototypical facial expressions (the system is not using a model of the face nor a framing system). A second architecture using the rhythm of the interaction first allows a robust learning of the facial expressions without face tracking and next performs the learning involved in face recognition. Our more striking conclusion is that, for infants, learning to recognize a face could be more complex than recognizing a facial expression. Consequently, we emphasize the importance of the emotional resonance as a mechanism to ensure the dynamical coupling between individuals, allowing the learning of increasingly complex tasks.
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paper_title: Incremental Learning of Tasks From User Demonstrations, Past Experiences, and Vocal Comments

paper_content:

Since many years the robotics community is envisioning robot assistants sharing the same environment with humans. It became obvious that they have to interact with humans and should adapt to individual user needs. Especially the high variety of tasks robot assistants will be facing requires a highly adaptive and user-friendly programming interface. One possible solution to this programming problem is the learning-by-demonstration paradigm, where the robot is supposed to observe the execution of a task, acquire task knowledge, and reproduce it. In this paper, a system to record, interpret, and reason over demonstrations of household tasks is presented. The focus is on the model-based representation of manipulation tasks, which serves as a basis for incremental reasoning over the acquired task knowledge. The aim of the reasoning is to condense and interconnect the data, resulting in more general task knowledge. A measure for the assessment of information content of task features is introduced. This measure for the relevance of certain features relies both on general background knowledge as well as task-specific knowledge gathered from the user demonstrations. Beside the autonomous information estimation of features, speech comments during the execution, pointing out the relevance of features are considered as well. The results of the incremental growth of the task knowledge when more task demonstrations become available and their fusion with relevance information gained from speech comments is demonstrated within the task of laying a table
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paper_title: Development of joint attention and social referencing

paper_content:

In this work, we are interested in understanding how emotional interactions with a social partner can bootstrap increasingly complex behaviors such as social referencing. Our idea is that social referencing, facial expression recognition and the joint attention can emerge from a simple sensori-motor architecture. Without knowing that the other is an agent, we show our robot is able to learn some complex tasks if the human partner has a low level emotional resonance with the robot head. Hence we advocate the idea that social referencing can be bootstrapped from a simple sensori-motor system not dedicated to social interactions.
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paper_title: Situated robot learning for multi-modal instruction and imitation of grasping

paper_content:

Abstract A key prerequisite to make user instruction of work tasks by interactive demonstration effective and convenient is situated multi-modal interaction aiming at an enhancement of robot learning beyond simple low-level skill acquisition. We report the status of the Bielefeld GRAVIS-robot system that combines visual attention and gestural instruction with an intelligent interface for speech recognition and linguistic interpretation to allow multi-modal task-oriented instructions. With respect to this platform, we discuss the essential role of learning for robust functioning of the robot and sketch the concept of an integrated architecture for situated learning on the system level. It has the long-term goal to demonstrate speech-supported imitation learning of robot actions. We describe the current state of its realization to enable imitation of human hand postures for flexible grasping and give quantitative results for grasping a broad range of everyday objects.
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paper_title: Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot

paper_content:

Human social dynamics rely upon the ability to correctly attribute beliefs, goals, and percepts to other people. The set of abilities that allow an individual to infer these hidden mental states based on observed actions and behavior has been called a “theory of mind” (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Existing models of theory of mind have sought to identify a developmental progression of social skills that serve as the basis for more complex cognitive abilities. These skills include detecting eye contact, identifying self-propelled stimuli, and attributing intent to moving objects. ::: If we are to build machines that interact naturally with people, our machines must both interpret the behavior of others according to these social rules and display the social cues that will allow people to naturally interpret the machine's behavior. ::: Drawing from the models of Baron-Cohen (1995) and Leslie (1994), a novel architecture called embodied theory of mind was developed to link high-level cognitive skills to the low-level perceptual abilities of a humanoid robot. The implemented system determines visual saliency based on inherent object attributes, high-level task constraints, and the attentional states of others. Objects of interest are tracked in real-time to produce motion trajectories which are analyzed by a set of naive physical laws designed to discriminate animate from inanimate movement. Animate objects can be the source of attentional states (detected by finding faces and head orientation) as well as intentional states (determined by motion trajectories between objects). Individual components are evaluated by comparisons to human performance on similar tasks, and the complete system is evaluated in the context of a basic social learning mechanism that allows the robot to mimic observed movements. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
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paper_title: Imitation as a communication tool for online facial expression learning and recognition

paper_content:

We are interested in understanding how babies learn to recognize facial expressions without having a teaching signal allowing to associate a facial expression to a given abstract label (i.e the name of the facial expression ‘sadness’, ‘happiness’…). Our starting point was a mathematical model showing that if the baby uses a sensory motor architecture for the recognition of the facial expression then the parents must imitate the baby facial expression to allow the on-line learning. In this paper, a first series of robotics experiments showing that a simple neural network model can control the robot head and learn on-line to recognize the facial expressions (the human partner imitates the robot prototypical facial expressions) is presented. We emphasize the importance of the emotions as a mechanism to ensure the dynamical coupling between individuals allowing to learn more complex tasks
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paper_title: Movement imitation with nonlinear dynamical systems in humanoid robots

paper_content:

Presents an approach to movement planning, on-line trajectory modification, and imitation learning by representing movement plans based on a set of nonlinear differential equations with well-defined attractor dynamics. The resultant movement plan remains an autonomous set of nonlinear differential equations that forms a control policy (CP) which is robust to strong external perturbations and that can be modified on-line by additional perceptual variables. We evaluate the system with a humanoid robot simulation and an actual humanoid robot. Experiments are presented for the imitation of three types of movements: reaching movements with one arm, drawing movements of 2-D patterns, and tennis swings. Our results demonstrate (a) that multi-joint human movements can be encoded successfully by the CPs, (b) that a learned movement policy can readily be reused to produce robust trajectories towards different targets, (c) that a policy fitted for one particular target provides a good predictor of human reaching movements towards neighboring targets, and (d) that the parameter space which encodes a policy is suitable for measuring to which extent two trajectories are qualitatively similar.
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paper_title: Towards shared attention through geometric reasoning for Human Robot Interaction

paper_content:

Human Robot Interaction brings new challenges to the geometric reasoning and space sharing. The robot should not only reason on its own capacities but also consider the actual situation by looking from human's eyes, thus “putting itself to human's perspective”. In humans, the “visual perspective taking” ability begins to appear by 24 months of age and is used to determine if another person can see an object or not. In this paper, we present a geometric reasoning mechanism that employs psychological concepts of “perspective taking” and “mental rotation” in order to reason what the human sees, what the robot sees and where the robot should focus to share human's attention. This geometric reasoning mechanism is demonstrated with HRP-2 humanoid robot in a human-robot face-to-face interaction context.
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paper_title: Emergent imitative behavior on a robotic arm based on visuo-motor associative memories

paper_content:

Mimicry and deferred imitation have often been considered as separate kinds of imitation. In this paper, we present a simple architecture for robotic arm control which can be used for both. The model is based on some dynamical equations [1], which provide a motor control with exploring and converging capacities. A visuo-motor map [2] is used to associate positions of the end effector in the visual space with proprioceptive position of the robotic arm. It enables a fast learning of the visuo-motor associations without needing to embed a priori information. The controller can be used both for accurate control and interaction. It has been implemented on a minimal robotic setup showing some interesting emergent properties. The robot can reproduce simple gestures in mimicry situation and finalized actions in deferred imitation situation. Moreover, it can even show some “intention” recognition abilities. Finally, the experiment of deferred imitation which inherits from learning by demonstration, also provides a good basis for cooperative and interactive experiments.
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paper_title: Towards life-long learning in household robots: The Piagetian approach

paper_content:

Learning is a core feature of future household robot systems. Nonetheless, present-day learning approaches fail to take into account that learning is never a finished process but an everyday task for biological systems. Additionally, humans always learn a various number of different tasks at the same time. This paper proposes an approach to these two problems by applying the concept of Piagetian learning to the problem of robot task learning. It proposes a method for the autonomous recognition of different task classes in the robots experiences and gives one possibility, how this task knowledge can be exploited for incremental learning of sequential reordering features of a task. This framework is evaluated using three different tasks from the household domain.
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paper_title: Superpositioning of behaviors learned through teleoperation

paper_content:

This paper reports that the superposition of a small set of behaviors, learned via teleoperation, can lead to robust completion of an articulated reach-and-grasp task. The results support the hypothesis that a robot can learn to interact purposefully with its environment through a developmental acquisition of sensory-motor coordination. Teleoperation can bootstrap the process by enabling the robot to observe its own sensory responses to actions that lead to specific outcomes within an environment. It is shown that a reach-and-grasp task, learned by an articulated robot through a small number of teleoperated trials, can be performed autonomously with success in the face of significant variations in the environment and perturbations of the goal. In particular, teleoperation of the robot to reach and grasp an object at nine different locations in its workspace enabled robust autonomous performance of the task anywhere within the workspace. Superpositioning was performed using the Verbs and Adverbs algorithm that was developed originally for the graphical animation of articulated characters. The work was performed on Robonaut, the NASA space-capable humanoid at Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX.
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paper_title: Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind

paper_content:

Mindblindness and mindreading evolutionary psychology and social chess mindreading - nature's choice developing mindreading - the four steps autism and mindblindness how brains read minds the language of the eyes mindreading - back to the future.
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paper_title: Robot See, Robot Do : An Overview of Robot Imitation

paper_content:

A belt grinding machine which is equipped with an elastically flexible load beam extending over the entire operative length of an endless grinding belt for applying the necessary grinding pressure to the belt. The effective pressure-applying surface of said beam is suspended for elevational control from support elements distributed at intervals along the length of the beam and attached to an elevationally movable carrier preferably in the form of transverse beams mounted on push rods operable by a pressure medium. The push rods are associated with constant delay mechanism adjustable to the difference in time between the instant of response of a sensing element to the passage of the leading end of a workpiece and the instant the grinding action begins, on the one hand, and between the instant of response of a sensing element to the passage of the trailing end of the workpiece and the instant the grinding action terminates, on the other hand.
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paper_title: On Learning, Representing, and Generalizing a Task in a Humanoid Robot

paper_content:

We present a programming-by-demonstration framework for generically extracting the relevant features of a given task and for addressing the problem of generalizing the acquired knowledge to different contexts. We validate the architecture through a series of experiments, in which a human demonstrator teaches a humanoid robot simple manipulatory tasks. A probability-based estimation of the relevance is suggested by first projecting the motion data onto a generic latent space using principal component analysis. The resulting signals are encoded using a mixture of Gaussian/Bernoulli distributions (Gaussian mixture model/Bernoulli mixture model). This provides a measure of the spatio-temporal correlations across the different modalities collected from the robot, which can be used to determine a metric of the imitation performance. The trajectories are then generalized using Gaussian mixture regression. Finally, we analytically compute the trajectory which optimizes the imitation metric and use this to generalize the skill to different contexts
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paper_title: Joint Visual Attention Modeling for Naturally Interacting Robotic Agents

paper_content:

This paper elaborates on mechanisms for establishing visual joint attention for the design of robotic agents that learn through natural interfaces, following a developmental trajectory not unlike infants. We describe first the evolution of cognitive skills in infants and then the adaptation of cognitive development patterns in robotic design. A comprehensive outlook for cognitively inspired robotic design schemes pertaining to joint attention is presented for the last decade, with particular emphasis on practical implementation issues. A novel cognitively inspired joint attention fixation mechanism is defined for robotic agents.
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paper_title: Reinforcement learning for imitating constrained reaching movements

paper_content:

The goal of developing algorithms for programming robots by demonstration is to create an easy way of programming robots that can be accomplished by everyone. When a demonstrator teaches a task to a robot, he/she shows some ways of fulfilling the task, but not all the possibilities. The robot must then be able to reproduce the task even when unexpected perturbations occur. In this case, it has to learn a new solution. In this paper, we describe a system to teach to the robot constrained reaching tasks. Our system is based on a dynamical system generator modulated with a learned speed trajectory and combined with a reinforcement learning module to allow the robot to adapt the trajectory when facing a new situation, such as avoiding obstacles.
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paper_title: Dynamical System Modulation for Robot Learning via Kinesthetic Demonstrations

paper_content:

We present a system for robust robot skill acquisition from kinesthetic demonstrations. This system allows a robot to learn a simple goal-directed gesture and correctly reproduce it despite changes in the initial conditions and perturbations in the environment. It combines a dynamical system control approach with tools of statistical learning theory and provides a solution to the inverse kinematics problem when dealing with a redundant manipulator. The system is validated on two experiments involving a humanoid robot: putting an object into a box and reaching for and grasping an object.
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paper_title: Extended Hopfield Network for Sequence Learning: Application to Gesture Recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we extend the Hopfield Associative Memory for storing multiple sequences of varying duration. We apply the model for learning, recognizing and encoding a set of human gestures. We measure systematically the performance of the model against noise.
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paper_title: Learning of oculo-motor control: a prelude to robotic imitation

paper_content:

In order to allow robot agents to adapt their behaviour, a new approach-learning by imitation-has been proposed, in which a robot learns novel behaviours through interactions with the environment and other agents. In this paper we describe how our sighted agent, ESCHeR -who is equipped with dual foveated lenses and can control head, neck and eye joints-develops fine oculo-motor control through interaction with the environment. ESCHeR successfully learns to coordinate pan, tilt and vergence such that he can track bright moving objects and saccade rapidly to new objects of interest. In developmental terms, ESCHeR can be considered to have progressed from stage 1 to stage 2 of imitation learning. A novel representation of visual scenes is then introduced, and it is discussed how ESCHeR will use this to progress to stage 3.
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paper_title: Geometric Tools for Perspective Taking for Human–Robot Interaction

paper_content:

Psychological studies on human interactions made surface the notion perspective taking. This notion, referring to reason on other persons' points of view, eases the communication between interacting individuals. For a robot interacting with people, we believe that perspective taking can play an important role that will allow the robot to understand, reason and act according to human's point of view thus allowing an efficient communication and cooperation. In this paper, we propose a group of algorithms to evaluate and generate robot configurations that are not only collision free but also obeying HRI constraints by reasoning explicitly on human's perspective.
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paper_title: Learning to Communicate Through Imitation in Autonomous Robots

paper_content:

Communication is a desirable skill for robots. We describe a method of how these skills could be learned. A control architecture of connectionist model combining life-long learning and predefined behaviours is developed and implemented in a physical system of two autonomous robots. A teaching scenario based on movement imitation is used to teach a basic non grammatical language. Teaching is done from a teacher robot to a student robot. While following the teacher, the student robot learns a basic vocabulary concerning its movements and location.
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paper_title: Spatial reasoning for human robot interaction

paper_content:

Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human-aware motion system must not only elaborate safe robot motions, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible movement. This paper focuses on a manipulation planner and a placement mechanism that take explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in presence or in synergy with humans.
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paper_title: Embodied Gesture Processing: Motor-Based Integration of Perception and Action in Social Artificial Agents

paper_content:

A close coupling of perception and action processes is assumed to play an important role in basic capabilities of social interaction, such as guiding attention and observation of others’ behavior, coordinating the form and functions of behavior, or grounding the understanding of others’ behavior in one’s own experiences. In the attempt to endow artificial embodied agents with similar abilities, we present a probabilistic model for the integration of perception and generation of hand-arm gestures via a hierarchy of shared motor representations, allowing for combined bottom-up and top-down processing. Results from human-agent interactions are reported demonstrating the model’s performance in learning, observation, imitation, and generation of gestures.
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paper_title: Robot-Assisted Therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorders with (Partially) Autonomous Control: Challenges and Outlook

paper_content:

Abstract Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) is an emerging field that has already seen some success and is likely to develop in the future. One particular application area is within therapies for autism spectrum disorders, in which the viability of the approach has been demonstrated. The present paper is a vision paper with the aim of identifying research directions in the near future of RAT. Specifically, we argue that the next step in such therapeutic scenarios is the development of more substantial levels of autonomy which would allow the robot to adapt to the individual needs of children over longer periods of time (while remaining under the ultimate supervision of a therapist). We argue that this requires new advances on the level of robot controllers as well as the ability to infer and classify intentions, goals and emotional states of the robot’s interactants. We show that the state of the art in a number of relevant disciplines is now at the point at which such an endeavour can be approached in earnest.
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paper_title: Robots for Use in Autism Research

paper_content:

Autism spectrum disorders are a group of lifelong disabilities that affect people's ability to communicate and to understand social cues. Research into applying robots as therapy tools has shown that robots seem to improve engagement and elicit novel social behaviors from people (particularly children and teenagers) with autism. Robot therapy for autism has been explored as one of the first application domains in the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR), which aims to develop robots that assist people with special needs through social interactions. In this review, we discuss the past decade's work in SAR systems designed for autism therapy by analyzing robot design decisions, human-robot interactions, and system evaluations. We conclude by discussing challenges and future trends for this young but rapidly developing research area.
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paper_title: The Clinical Use of Robots for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Critical Review.

paper_content:

Abstract We examined peer-reviewed studies in order to understand the current status of empirically based evidence on the clinical applications of robots in the diagnosis and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Studies are organized into four broad categories: (a) the response of individuals with ASD to robots or robot-like behavior in comparison to human behavior, (b) the use of robots to elicit behaviors, (c) the use of robots to model, teach, and/or practice a skill, and (d) the use of robots to provide feedback on performance. A critical review of the literature revealed that most of the findings are exploratory and have methodological limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the clinical utility of robots. Finally, we outline the research needed to determine the incremental validity of this technique.
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paper_title: Automated detection and classification of positive vs. negative robot interactions with children with autism using distance-based features

paper_content:

Recent feasibility studies involving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) interacting with socially assistive robots have shown that some children have positive reactions to robots, while others may have negative reactions. It is unlikely that children with ASD will enjoy any robot 100% of the time. It is therefore important to develop methods for detecting negative child behaviors in order to minimize distress and facilitate effective human-robot interaction. Our past work has shown that negative reactions can be readily identified and classified by a human observer from overhead video data alone, and that an automated position tracker combined with human-determined heuristics can differentiate between the two classes of reactions. This paper describes and validates an improved, non-heuristic method for determining if a child is interacting positively or negatively with a robot, based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and a naive-Bayes classifier of overhead camera observations. The approach achieves a 91.4% accuracy rate in classifying robot interaction, parent interaction, avoidance, and hiding against the wall behaviors and demonstrates that these classes are sufficient for distinguishing between positive and negative reactions of the child to the robot.
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paper_title: Exploring emotional and imitational android-based interactions in autistic spectrum disorders

paper_content:

1 Interdepartmental Research Center “E. Piaggio”, University of Pisa, Italy 2 Scientific Institute Stella Maris (IRCCS), Pisa, Italy Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have impairments in processing of social and emotional information. To widen emotive responsiveness, the employment of robotic systems to engage proactive interactive responses in children with ASDs has been recently suggested. Understanding and teaching the processing of socio-emotional abilities is the inspiring principle of this novel approach and could be of tremendous clinical significance. Encouraging studies with robotic dolls, mobile robots and humanoids acting as social mediators have provided important insights and demonstrate the necessity of long term studies. In this study we report on a series of experiments on four subjects affected by ASDs as they interact with a biomimetic android. We assessed both their spontaneous behavior and reactions to therapist presses in correlation with the time course of the physiological and behavioral data, as well as the focusing of attention towards the android’s eye movements and the spontaneous ability to imitate gesture and facial expressions. Overall, subjects demonstrated a decrease in dysfunction in the areas of social communication, implying a marked improvement in these areas after interacting with the android. EXPLORING EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIONAL ANDROID-BASED INTERACTIONS IN AUTISTIC SPECTRUM DISORDERS
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paper_title: Intact automatic imitation of human and robot actions in autism spectrum disorders

paper_content:

The existence of a specialized imitation module in humans is hotly debated. Studies suggesting a specific imitation impairment in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) support a modular view. However, the voluntary imitation tasks used in these studies (which require socio-cognitive abilities in addition to imitation for successful performance) cannot support claims of a specific impairment. Accordingly, an automatic imitation paradigm (a ‘cleaner’ measure of imitative ability) was used to assess the imitative ability of 16 adults with ASD and 16 non-autistic matched control participants. Participants performed a prespecified hand action in response to observed hand actions performed either by a human or a robotic hand. On compatible trials the stimulus and response actions matched, while on incompatible trials the two actions did not match. Replicating previous findings, the Control group showed an automatic imitation effect: responses on compatible trials were faster than those on incompatible trials. This effect was greater when responses were made to human than to robotic actions (‘animacy bias’). The ASD group also showed an automatic imitation effect and a larger animacy bias than the Control group. We discuss these findings with reference to the literature on imitation in ASD and theories of imitation.
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paper_title: An android for enhancing social skills and emotion recognition in people with autism

paper_content:

It is well documented that the processing of social and emotional information is impaired in people with autism. Recent studies have shown that individuals, particularly those with high functioning autism, can learn to cope with common social situations if they are made to enact possible scenarios they may encounter in real life during therapy. The main aim of this work is to describe an interactive life-like facial display (FACE) and a supporting therapeutic protocol that will enable us to verify if the system can help children with autism to learn, identify, interpret, and use emotional information and extend these skills in a socially appropriate, flexible, and adaptive context. The therapeutic setup consists of a specially equipped room in which the subject, under the supervision of a therapist, can interact with FACE. The android display and associated control system has automatic facial tracking, expression recognition, and eye tracking. The treatment scheme is based on a series of therapist-guided sessions in which a patient communicates with FACE through an interactive console. Preliminary data regarding the exposure to FACE of two children are reported.
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paper_title: Towards interactive robots in autism therapy: Background, motivation and challenges

paper_content:

This article discusses the potential of using interactive environments in autism therapy. We specifically address issues relevant to the Aurora project, which studies the possible role of autonomous, mobile robots as therapeutic tools for children with autism. Theories of mindreading, social cognition and imitation that informed the Aurora project are discussed and their relevance to the project is outlined. Our approach is put in the broader context of socially intelligent agents and interactive environments. We summarise results from trials with a particular mobile robot. Finally, we draw some comparisons to research on interactive virtual environments in the context of autism therapy and education. We conclude by discussing future directions and open issues.
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paper_title: Does appearance matter in the interaction of children with autism with a humanoid robot

paper_content:

This article studies the impact of a robot’s appearance on interactions involving four children with autism. This work is part of the Aurora project with the overall aim to support interaction skills in children with autism, using robots as ‘interactive toys’ that can encourage and mediate interactions. We follow an approach commonly adopted in assistive robotics and work with a small group of children with autism. This article investigates which robot appearances are suitable to encourage interactions between a robot and children with autism. The children’s levels of interaction with and response to different appearances of two types of robots are compared: a small humanoid doll, and a life-sized ‘Theatrical Robot’ (a mime artist behaving like a robot). The small humanoid robot appeared either as a human-like ‘pretty doll’ or as a ‘robot’ with plain features. The Theatrical Robot was presented either as an ordinary human, or with plain clothing and a featureless, masked face. The results of these trials clearly indicate the children’s preference in their initial response for interaction with a plain, featureless robot over the interaction with a human-like robot. In the case of the life-size Theatrical Robot, the response of children towards the plain/robotic robot was notably more social and pro-active. Implications of these results for our work on using robots as assistive technology for children with autism and their possible use in autism research are discussed.
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paper_title: FMRI study of young adults with autism interacting with a humanoid robot

paper_content:

The belief that artificial agents are useful interaction partners in cognitive therapies of social disorders such as autism fuels an increasing number of research projects involving the developments of robots and computer avatars. Yet, for an appropriate use of these new tools, it is necessary to understand how perception of and interaction with artificial agents differ from natural agents, both in normally developed adults and in patients with disorders of social cognition. Here we investigated the neural bases of social interactions with a human or with a humanoid robot using fMRI. During interaction, participants were playing a computerized version of the game chifumi (stone-paper-scissors), while believing they were interacting ‘live’ either with a fellow human (Intentional agent, Int), a humanoid robot endowed with an artificial intelligence (Artificial agent, Art), or a random number generator running on a laptop (Rnd). The belief was built both with an extensive briefing before the actual experiment, including a live interaction with the human and humanoid robot opponents, and with videos of the opponent, presented as live but actually recorded prior to the experiment, that preceded and followed each series of 5 games played against one opponent in a block. Results indicate that the brain network found when interacting with an active opponent (Art & Int vs Rnd) was more activated when interacting with the human than with the robot agent, implying that interacting with a human is more engaging than interacting with an artificial agent. Areas involved in social interactions in the posterior temporal sulcus were activated when controls, but not high-functioning autistic patients patients, interacted with a fellow human.
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paper_title: Exploring emotional and imitational android-based interactions in autistic spectrum disorders

paper_content:

1 Interdepartmental Research Center “E. Piaggio”, University of Pisa, Italy 2 Scientific Institute Stella Maris (IRCCS), Pisa, Italy Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have impairments in processing of social and emotional information. To widen emotive responsiveness, the employment of robotic systems to engage proactive interactive responses in children with ASDs has been recently suggested. Understanding and teaching the processing of socio-emotional abilities is the inspiring principle of this novel approach and could be of tremendous clinical significance. Encouraging studies with robotic dolls, mobile robots and humanoids acting as social mediators have provided important insights and demonstrate the necessity of long term studies. In this study we report on a series of experiments on four subjects affected by ASDs as they interact with a biomimetic android. We assessed both their spontaneous behavior and reactions to therapist presses in correlation with the time course of the physiological and behavioral data, as well as the focusing of attention towards the android’s eye movements and the spontaneous ability to imitate gesture and facial expressions. Overall, subjects demonstrated a decrease in dysfunction in the areas of social communication, implying a marked improvement in these areas after interacting with the android. EXPLORING EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIONAL ANDROID-BASED INTERACTIONS IN AUTISTIC SPECTRUM DISORDERS
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paper_title: Socially Assistive Robotics

paper_content:

The recent trend toward developing a new generation of robots that are capable of moving and acting in human-centered environments, interacting with people, and participating in our daily lives has introduced the need for building robotic systems able to learn how to use their bodies to communicate and to react to their users in a social and engaging way. Social robots that interact with humans have thus become an important focus of robotics research.
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paper_title: How social robots will help us to diagnose , treat , and understand autism

paper_content:

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by social and communicative impairments. Social robots recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Social robots, and the technology used in their construction, can be unique tools in the study of autism. Based on three years of integration and immersion with a clinical research group, this paper discusses how social robots will make an impact on the ways in which we diagnose, treat, and understand autism.
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paper_title: Robotic assistants in therapy and education of children with autism: can a small humanoid robot help encourage social interaction skills?

paper_content:

This article presents a longitudinal study with four children with autism, who were exposed to a humanoid robot over a period of several months. The longitudinal approach allowed the children time to explore the space of robot–human, as well as human–human interaction. Based on the video material documenting the interactions, a quantitative and qualitative analysis was conducted. The quantitative analysis showed an increase in duration of pre-defined behaviours towards the later trials. A qualitative analysis of the video data, observing the children’s activities in their interactional context, revealed further aspects of social interaction skills (imitation, turn-taking and role-switch) and communicative competence that the children showed. The results clearly demonstrate the need for, and benefits of, long-term studies in order to reveal the full potential of robots in the therapy and education of children with autism.
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paper_title: Using conversation analysis to explore the recurrence of a topic in the talk of a boy with an autism spectrum disorder

paper_content:

Some higher functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are reported to produce perseverative talk, especially around ‘special interests’. Topic perseveration is a form of pragmatic impairment captured in Prizant and Rydell's (1993) continuum of unconventional verbal behaviour in autism. Although widely reported, there is little systematic empirical research into this phenomenon. This paper considers the utility of Conversation Analysis in developing knowledge in this area, drawing upon data involving a boy with an ASD interacting with a researcher and a mobile robot platform. Although a frequency analysis of the boy's talk on a single topic may suggest that it is perseverative in nature, in a sequential analysis of both talk and non‐spoken activities this study aims to show how these may be interactionally‐embedded. It is suggested that, in considering the interactional salience of apparently perseverative talk, it can be useful to explore the participation framework in which the topic ...
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paper_title: Children-robot interaction: a pilot study in autism therapy.

paper_content:

Abstract We present here a pilot study of child–robot interactions, in which we discuss developmental origins of human interpersonal communication. For the past few years, we have been observing 2- to 4-year-old children with autism interacting with Keepon, a creature-like robot that is only capable of expressing its attention (directing its gaze) and emotions (pleasure and excitement). While controlled by a remote experimenter, Keepon interacted with the children with its simple appearance and actions. With a sense of curiosity and security, the children spontaneously approached Keepon and engaged in dyadic interaction with it, which then extended to triadic interactions where they exchanged with adult caregivers pleasure and surprise they found in Keepon. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of these unfolding interactions suggests that autistic children possess the motivation to share mental states with others, which is contrary to the commonly held position that this motivation is impaired in autism. We assume Keepon's minimal expressiveness helped the children understand socially meaningful information, which then activated their intact motivation to share interests and feelings with others. We conclude that simple robots like Keepon would facilitate social interaction and its development in autistic children.
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paper_title: A long-term study of children with autism playing with a robotic pet: Taking inspirations from non-directive play therapy to encourage children's proactivity and initiative-taking

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel methodological approach of how to design, conduct and analyse robot-assisted play. This approach is inspired by nondirective play therapy. The experimenter participates in the experiments, but the child remains the main leader for play. Besides, beyond inspiration from non-directive play therapy, this approach enables the experimenter to regulate the interaction under specific conditions in order to guide the child or ask her questions about reasoning or affect related to the robot. This approach has been tested in a long-term study with six children with autism in a school setting. An autonomous robot with zoomorphic, dog-like appearance was used in the studies. The children’s progress was analyzed according to three dimensions, namely, Play, Reasoning and Affect. Results from the case-study evaluations have shown the capability of the method to meet each child’s needs and abilities. Children who mainly played solitarily progressively experienced basic imitation games with the experimenter. Children who proactively played socially progressively experienced higher levels of play and constructed more reasoning related to the robot. They also expressed some interest in the robot, including, on occasion, affect. Keywords: Human–Robot Interaction, Robot-Mediated Therapy, Robot-Assisted Play, Non-Directive Play Therapy, Assistive Technology, Autism, Children
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paper_title: Promoting interaction amongst autistic adolescents using robots

paper_content:

Most autistic people present some difficulties in developing social behavior, living in their own world. The intent of this study is to improve the social life of adolescents with both autism and mental impairment, with a main focus on promoting their social interaction and communication. An experiment designed to call for the adolescents' attention and enforce their collaboration is described; in it a LEGO MindStorm robot behaves as a mediator/promotor of this interaction. Further, sensory motor coordination and accuracy skills of the adolescents are also slightly explored. Four scenarios were envisaged. Results are described showing the outcomes of the experiment.
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paper_title: Toward socially assistive robotics for augmenting interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders

paper_content:

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have communication deficits and difficulties with social interaction. A lack of social behavior can hamper therapeutic interventions and can diminish the ability to learn social skills. Robots have been shown to provoke proactive social behavior in children with ASD. We are developing robot systems capable of acting as catalysts for social behavior in the context of ASD therapy. We present an experiment design for evaluating the effects of a socially assistive robot in a therapeutic setting and results of a pilot experiment with children with ASD interacting with such a robot.
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paper_title: The effectiveness of using a robotics class to foster collaboration among groups of children with autism in an exploratory study

paper_content:

This article describes an exploratory study involving the design of an after-school robotics class for groups of children at the higher-functioning end of the autistic spectrum. The aim of the study was to foster collaboration among the children in the context of a class where they programmed Lego robots under the guidance of an experimenter. The class took place once a week over several months and used many different measures to assess the children's collaborative behaviours. Detailed analysis of behavioural data is presented, and despite the small sample size, our findings suggest that the number of potentially collaborative behaviours the children displayed during a class is more strongly related to the amount of enjoyment the children derived from the classes than to the number of classes in which the children participated. Parallel-run, free-form drawing sessions conducted before certain classes gave some indication that these behavioural changes partly generalized to a different context. Additionally, many of the children in the class either found their experiences in class to be helpful in other social interactions or expected them to be.
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paper_title: Therapeutic-assisted robot for children with autism

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a therapeutic-assisted robot for children with autism to ameliorate their skill of joint attention. The robot conducts a goal-directed based interaction to establish engagement between the child and robot in order to establish a beneficial learning environment for autistic children. An unsupervised Mixture Gaussian-based cluster method is proposed to detect the child's intention in real time to process the goal-directed task smoothly. The novelty of this approach is that does not require the use of any training data or a trained model to detect the child's intention. Our autonomous robotic system is tested with several autistic children at a School for the Disabled in Nagoya, Japan. The results of the initial interaction showed that the children enjoyed interaction with and feedback from the robot, which confirmed that the robot can be used as mediator or an object of joint attention. The unsupervised approach was able to detect the children's intention at every time segment to process the goal-directed task with a higher accuracy rate. The results of the goal-directed task showed that the proposed interaction was highly effective in enhancing their joint attention. Since most of the children attempted to imitate the robot's gestural behaviors and used a variety of learning patterns to attend to the robot's fingered object in the environment to obtain joint attention with robot.
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paper_title: How social robots will help us to diagnose , treat , and understand autism

paper_content:

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by social and communicative impairments. Social robots recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Social robots, and the technology used in their construction, can be unique tools in the study of autism. Based on three years of integration and immersion with a clinical research group, this paper discusses how social robots will make an impact on the ways in which we diagnose, treat, and understand autism.
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paper_title: Mimicking and Evaluating Human Motion to Improve the Imitation Skill of Children with Autism Through a Robot

paper_content:

In this paper, we report techniques for mimicking and evaluating the human motion in real time by a therapeutic humanoid robot to improve the imitation skill of children with autism. For realizing the mimicking technique, we propose a method of selecting key frames using a Q-Learning approach to remove the significant noises. Then, in order to evaluate human motion in real time, we introduce a method of cluster-based framework of Mixture Gaussian and an Expectation-Maximization algorithm using parameters which are converted by Principal Component Analysis. Practical experiments have been performed to test the interaction of children with autism with the robot and evaluate the possibility of improving their imitation skills by training them to perform specific tasks through a robot.
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paper_title: Physiology-based affect recognition for computer-assisted intervention of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

paper_content:

Generally, an experienced therapist continuously monitors the affective cues of the children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and adjusts the course of the intervention accordingly. In this work, we address the problem of how to make the computer-based ASD intervention tools affect-sensitive by designing therapist-like affective models of the children with ASD based on their physiological responses. Two computer-based cognitive tasks are designed to elicit the affective states of liking, anxiety, and engagement that are considered important in autism intervention. A large set of physiological indices are investigated that may correlate with the above affective states of children with ASD. In order to have reliable reference points to link the physiological data to the affective states, the subjective reports of the affective states from a therapist, a parent, and the child himself/herself were collected and analyzed. A support vector machines (SVM)-based affective model yields reliable prediction with approximately 82.9% success when using the therapist's reports. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the affective states of children with ASD have been experimentally detected via physiology-based affect recognition technique.
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paper_title: Emotion research by the people , for the people

paper_content:

Emotion research will leap forward when its focus changes from comparing averaged statistics of self-report data across people experiencing emotion in laboratories to characterizing patterns of data from individuals and clusters of similar individuals experiencing emotion in real life. Such an advance will come about through engineers and psychologists collaborating to create new ways for people to measure, share, analyze, and learn from objective emotional responses in situations that truly matter to people. This approach has the power to greatly advance the science of emotion while also providing personalized help to participants in the research.
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paper_title: Windowed cross-correlation and peak picking for the analysis of variability in the association between behavioral time series

paper_content:

Cross-correlation and most other longitudinal analyses assume that the association between 2 variables is stationary. Thus, a sample of occasions of measurement is expected to be representative of the association between variables regardless of the time of onset or number of occasions in the sample. The authors propose a method to analyze the association between 2 variables when the assumption of stationarity may not be warranted. The method results in estimates of both the strength of peak association and the time lag when the peak association occurred for a range of starting values of elapsed time from the beginning of an experiment.
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paper_title: Learning of Social Signatures Through Imitation Game Between a Robot and a Human Partner

paper_content:

In this paper, a robot learns different postures by imitating several partners. We assessed the effect of the type of partners, i.e., adults, typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), on robot learning during an imitation game. The experimental protocol was divided into two phases: (1) a learning phase, during which the robot produced a random posture and the partner imitated the robot; and (2) a phase in which the roles were reversed and the robot had to imitate the posture of the human partner. Robot learning was based on a sensory-motor architecture whereby neural networks (N.N.) enabled the robot to associate what it did with what it saw. Several metrics (i.e., annotation, the number of neurons needed to learn, and normalized mutual information) were used to show that the partners affected robot learning. The first result obtained was that learning was easier with adults than with both groups of children, indicating a developmental effect. Second, learning was more complex with children with ASD compared to both adults and TD children. Third, learning with the more complex partner first (i.e., children with ASD) enabled learning to be more easily generalized.
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paper_title: Automatic imitation assessment in interaction

paper_content:

Detecting social events such as imitation is identified as key step for the development of socially aware robots. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach to measure immediate synchronous and asynchronous imitations between two partners. The proposed model is based on two steps: detection of interest points in images and evaluation of similarity between actions. Firstly, spatio-temporal points are detected for an accurate selection of the important information contained in videos. Then bag-of-words models are constructed, describing the visual content of videos. Finally similarity between bag-of-words models is measured with dynamic-time-warping, giving an accurate measure of imitation between partners. Experimental results obtained show that the model is able to discriminate between imitation and non-imitation phases of interactions.
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paper_title: Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines

paper_content:

Synchrony refers to individuals' temporal coordination during social interactions. The analysis of this phenomenon is complex, requiring the perception and integration of multimodal communicative signals. The evaluation of synchrony has received multidisciplinary attention because of its role in early development, language learning, and social connection. Originally studied by developmental psychologists, synchrony has now captured the interest of researchers in such fields as social signal processing, robotics, and machine learning. This paper emphasizes the current questions asked by synchrony evaluation and the state-of-the-art related methods. First, we present definitions and functions of synchrony in youth and adulthood. Next, we review the noncomputational and computational approaches of annotating, evaluating, and modeling interactional synchrony. Finally, the current limitations and future research directions in the fields of developmental robotics, social robotics, and clinical studies are discussed.
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paper_title: A System for Real-Time Multimodal Analysis of Nonverbal Affective Social Interaction in User-Centric Media

paper_content:

This paper presents a multimodal system for real-time analysis of nonverbal affective social interaction in small groups of users. The focus is on two major aspects of affective social interaction: the synchronization of the affective behavior within a small group and the emergence of functional roles, such as leadership. A small group of users is modeled as a complex system consisting of single interacting components that can auto-organize and show global properties. Techniques are developed for computing quantitative measures of both synchronization and leadership. Music is selected as experimental test-bed since it is a clear example of interactive and social activity, where affective nonverbal communication plays a fundamental role. The system has been implemented as software modules for the EyesWeb XMI platform (http://www.eyesweb.org). It has been used in experimental frameworks (a violin duo and a string quartet) and in real-world applications (in user-centric applications for active music listening). Further application scenarios include entertainment, edutainment, therapy and rehabilitation, cultural heritage, and museum applications. Research has been carried out in the framework of the EU-ICT FP7 Project SAME (http://www.sameproject.eu).
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paper_title: Multimodal Processing of Discourse Information; The Effect of Synchrony

paper_content:

This paper describes progress in the design of unobtrusive technology for the tracking of participant status and engagement in spoken conversations. The apparatus and algorithms have applications in human-computer interface design and will enable a better level of communication between an information providing system, or robot, and a human user by mimicking the nonverbal processes that are an essential part of human-human face-to-face spoken interactions.
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paper_title: Trends and considerations in robot-assisted autism therapy

paper_content:

Recent research suggests that children with autism exhibit certain positive social behaviors while interacting with robots that are not observed while interacting with their peers, caregivers, and therapists. This paper explores trends in robot-assisted autism therapy, as well as some of the specific therapies that have been shown to elicit desirable social interactions when working with children with autism. Considerations for the design of robots for use in robot-assisted therapies are also presented. Finally, general conclusions and recommendations are made to help further the work of robot-assisted autism therapy.
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paper_title: Affective Computing and Autism

paper_content:

: This article highlights the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing. We propose that a collaboration between autism research and affective computing could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes—from developing new tools to assist people with autism in understanding and operating in the socioemotional world around them, to developing new computational models and theories that will enable technology to be modified to provide an overall better socioemotional experience to all people who use it. This article describes work toward this convergence at the MIT Media Lab, and anticipates new research that might arise from the interaction between research into autism, technology, and human socioemotional intelligence.
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paper_title: Nonverbal synchrony in psychotherapy: Coordinated body movement reflects relationship quality and outcome.

paper_content:

Objective: The authors quantified nonverbal synchrony—the coordination of patient's and therapist's movement—in a random sample of same-sex psychotherapy dyads. The authors contrasted nonverbal synchrony in these dyads with a control condition and assessed its association with session-level and overall psychotherapy outcome. Method: Using an automated objective video analysis algorithm (Motion Energy Analysis; MEA), the authors calculated nonverbal synchrony in (n = 104) videotaped psychotherapy sessions from 70 Caucasian patients (37 women, 33 men, mean age = 36.5 years, SD = 10.2) treated at an outpatient psychotherapy clinic. The sample was randomly drawn from an archive (N = 301) of routinely videotaped psychotherapies. Patients and their therapists assessed session impact with self-report postsession questionnaires. A battery of pre- and postsymptomatology questionnaires measured therapy effectiveness. Results: The authors found that nonverbal synchrony is higher in genuine interactions contrasted with pseudointeractions (a control condition generated by a specifically designed shuffling procedure). Furthermore, nonverbal synchrony is associated with session-level process as well as therapy outcome: It is increased in sessions rated by patients as manifesting high relationship quality and in patients experiencing high self-efficacy. Higher nonverbal synchrony characterized psychotherapies with higher symptom reduction. Conclusions: The results suggest that nonverbal synchrony embodies the patients' self-reported quality of the relationship and further variables of therapy process. This hitherto overlooked facet of therapeutic relationships might prove useful as an indicator of therapy progress and outcome.
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paper_title: Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships With Computers And Robots

paper_content:

The field of Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) is a fast growing and increasingly important area that comprises highly active research activities and strongly interdisciplinary approaches. Socially Intelligent Agents, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Caamero and Bruce Edmonds, emerged from the AAAI Symposium "Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop". The book provides 32 chapters, written by leading SIA researchers, addressing topics such as: social robotics, embodied conversational agents, affective computing, anthropomorphism, narrative and story-telling, social aspects in multi-agent systems, new technologies for education and therapy, and more. This breadth of topics covered in Socially Intelligent Agents provides the reader with a comprehensive look at current research activities in the area. Socially Intelligent Agents serves as an excellent reference for a wide readership, e.g. computer scientists, roboticists, web programmers and designers, computer users, cognitive scientists, and other researchers interested in the study of how humans relate to computers and robots, and how these agents in return can relate to humans. This book is also suitable as research material in a variety of advanced level courses, including Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents, Human-Computer Interaction, Situated, Embodied AI.
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paper_title: Social Signal Processing: Survey of an Emerging Domain

paper_content:

The ability to understand and manage social signals of a person we are communicating with is the core of social intelligence. Social intelligence is a facet of human intelligence that has been argued to be indispensable and perhaps the most important for success in life. This paper argues that next-generation computing needs to include the essence of social intelligence - the ability to recognize human social signals and social behaviours like turn taking, politeness, and disagreement - in order to become more effective and more efficient. Although each one of us understands the importance of social signals in everyday life situations, and in spite of recent advances in machine analysis of relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, laughter, and similar, design and development of automated systems for social signal processing (SSP) are rather difficult. This paper surveys the past efforts in solving these problems by a computer, it summarizes the relevant findings in social psychology, and it proposes a set of recommendations for enabling the development of the next generation of socially aware computing.
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paper_title: Spatiotemporal Symmetry and Multifractal Structure of Head Movements during Dyadic Conversation.

paper_content:

This study examined the influence of sex, social dominance, and context on motion-tracked head movements during dyadic conversations. Windowed cross-correlation analyses found high peak correlation between conversants' head movements over short (≈2-s) intervals and a high degree of nonstationarity. Nonstationarity in head movements was found to be positively related to the number of men in a conversation. Surrogate data analysis offsetting the conversants' time series by a large lag was unable to reject the null hypothesis that the observed high peak correlations were unrelated to short-term coordination between conversants. One way that high peak correlations could be observed when 2 time series are offset by a large time lag is for each time series to exhibit self-similarity over a range of scales. Multifractal analysis found small-scale fluctuations to be persistent, τ(q) 0.5. These results are consistent with a view that symmetry is formed between conversants over short intervals and that this symmetry is broken at longer, irregular intervals.
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paper_title: Multimodal coordination: exploring relevant features and measures

paper_content:

The decisive role of interpersonal coordination in social interactions is well established. As human beings, we are "experts" in decoding and producing social signals, learning since our birth. Though, equipping a machine with the same abilities represents a great challenge to design socially-accepted interfaces. Assessing automatically this coordination requires selecting the most relevant features. In this paper, various audio and visual features are investigated to characterize interactional synchrony in a cooperative task. A hierarchical representation of the similarity between extracted features is proposed. The properties of time-domain (correlation coefficients) and frequency-domain (coherence) synchrony measures are confronted. The presented results support the evidence that synchrony is a multimodal phenomenon. Moreover, it can be assessed both on local (short-length windows of interaction) or global scales (entire interaction).
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paper_title: Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues

paper_content:

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 “Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication,” primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST 2102 International Conference on “Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues” held in Budapest, Hungary, September 7–10, 2010 (http://berber.tmit.bme.hu/cost2102/). The main focus of the conference was on methods to combine and build up knowledge through verbal and nonverbal signals enacted in an environment and in a context. In previous meetings, COST 2102 focused on the importance of uncovering and exploiting the wealth of information conveyed by multimodal signals. The next steps have been to analyze actions performed in response to multimodal signals and to study how these actions are organized in a realistic and socially believable context. The focus was on processing issues, since the new approach is computationally complex and the amount of data to be treated may be considered algorithmically infeasible. Therefore, data processing for gainingenactive knowledge must account for natural and intuitive approaches, based more on heuristics and experiences rather than on symbols, as well as on the discovery of new processing possibilities that account for new approaches for data analysis, coordination of the data flow through synchronization and temporal organization and optimization of the extracted features.
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paper_title: Randomized, controlled trial of an intervention for toddlers with autism: the Early Start Denver Model.

paper_content:

OBJECTIVE ::: To conduct a randomized, controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention, for improving outcomes of toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: Forty-eight children diagnosed with ASD between 18 and 30 months of age were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: (1) ESDM intervention, which is based on developmental and applied behavioral analytic principles and delivered by trained therapists and parents for 2 years; or (2) referral to community providers for intervention commonly available in the community. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Compared with children who received community-intervention, children who received ESDM showed significant improvements in IQ, adaptive behavior, and autism diagnosis. Two years after entering intervention, the ESDM group on average improved 17.6 standard score points (1 SD: 15 points) compared with 7.0 points in the comparison group relative to baseline scores. The ESDM group maintained its rate of growth in adaptive behavior compared with a normative sample of typically developing children. In contrast, over the 2-year span, the comparison group showed greater delays in adaptive behavior. Children who received ESDM also were more likely to experience a change in diagnosis from autism to pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, than the comparison group. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: This is the first randomized, controlled trial to demonstrate the efficacy of a comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention for toddlers with ASD for improving cognitive and adaptive behavior and reducing severity of ASD diagnosis. Results of this study underscore the importance of early detection of and intervention in autism.
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<format>
Title: Interactive Technologies for Autistic Children: A Review

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the role of multimodal social-emotional interactions in child development, particularly in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and the significance of ICT in therapy for ASD.

Section 2: Interactive Environments
Description 2: Describe collaborative interactive environments, their advances, and their impact on children with ASD, including examples of software education platforms and edutainment.

Section 3: The Use of a Computer for Individuals with ASD
Description 3: Discuss how computer applications can help children with ASD, emphasizing the benefits of computers' predictability and consistency.

Section 4: Special Input Devices: Touch Screens and Other Technologies
Description 4: Explore the use of touch screens, VR, and other ICT devices that enable children with ASD to interact with educational content.

Section 5: Virtual Environments
Description 5: Evaluate virtual environments as a tool for social interventions, detailing their benefits and how they mimic social situations to help children with ASD.

Section 6: Avatars for Autism and Serious Games
Description 6: Examine the role of avatars and serious games in educating children with ASD, focusing on their ability to improve social cognition and interaction.

Section 7: Telerehabilitation for Autism
Description 7: Define telerehabilitation and its applications for providing rehabilitation services remotely, specifically for families with children with ASD.

Section 8: What is the Contribution of Robotics to Children with ASD?
Description 8: Investigate the contribution of robotics to the education and therapy of children with ASD, including the phases of physical robot design, human-robot interaction, and evaluations in therapy-like settings.

Section 9: Robotics and Children with Autism
Description 9: Categorize the roles of robots in therapy for children with ASD, such as eliciting behaviors, teaching or modeling skills, and providing feedback and encouragement.

Section 10: Discussion and Conclusion
Description 10: Summarize the key findings and propose future directions for improving ICT devices in treating ASD, including the role of social robotics and avenues for multidisciplinary research.
</format>
