Reading facial expressions from real and virtual humans. This project aims to advance understanding of human emotional communication and improve human rapport with the virtual humans and avatars that are rapidly infiltrating our social world. Using two unique stimulus sets - naturalistic human expressions and highly realistic virtual faces - together with powerful genetic, experimental, and individual differences designs, the project expects to answer previously intractable questions in emotion ....Reading facial expressions from real and virtual humans. This project aims to advance understanding of human emotional communication and improve human rapport with the virtual humans and avatars that are rapidly infiltrating our social world. Using two unique stimulus sets - naturalistic human expressions and highly realistic virtual faces - together with powerful genetic, experimental, and individual differences designs, the project expects to answer previously intractable questions in emotion science, as well as deliver tangible outcomes, such as new psychological tests to better understand human social connection. This should provide significant benefits, by improving emotion communication and offering a new perspective on how artificial intelligence can best serve human social needs.
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Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200101079
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$426,241.00
Summary
Safe distractions? Taking the danger out of competing activities. Distracted driving is an increasing safety concern in Australia and worldwide. Smartphones play key roles in today’s professional and social contexts and current road safety policies based on stopping their use while driving have shown little success. Distraction is predicted to be an even greater issue in new semi-automated vehicles. This project proposes an innovative approach that will enable safe engagement in competing tasks ....Safe distractions? Taking the danger out of competing activities. Distracted driving is an increasing safety concern in Australia and worldwide. Smartphones play key roles in today’s professional and social contexts and current road safety policies based on stopping their use while driving have shown little success. Distraction is predicted to be an even greater issue in new semi-automated vehicles. This project proposes an innovative approach that will enable safe engagement in competing tasks while driving non-automated and semi-automated vehicles. The outcomes will underpin the development of new technologies to reduce the potential adverse effects of these distractions and thus reduce deaths and serious injuries, representing significant cost savings to the health system and the community.Read moreRead less
Augmented Sociality: Enabling a Socialised Experience of Augmented Reality. This project will explore new socialised uses of Augmented Reality (AR) that expand creativity, social relations, and participation. We seek to better understand how AR content can be leveraged by people to create their own new ways of learning, collaborating, and relating with each other. To do so we will study and prototype new tools and platforms to allow non-experts to create their own AR media. We aim to enable peop ....Augmented Sociality: Enabling a Socialised Experience of Augmented Reality. This project will explore new socialised uses of Augmented Reality (AR) that expand creativity, social relations, and participation. We seek to better understand how AR content can be leveraged by people to create their own new ways of learning, collaborating, and relating with each other. To do so we will study and prototype new tools and platforms to allow non-experts to create their own AR media. We aim to enable people of all ages, education, and background, to imagine and create, and not just passively consume, AR contents, services, and applications. We will generate new applications of AR, a new platform to collaboratively create these applications, and a new theory of 'Augmented Sociality' to guide AR design.
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Enabling Situated Immersive Science Collaboration with Remote Sensing Data . This project aims to help scientists communicate and collaborate in immersive environments. Fieldwork is more valuable to scientists than looking at abstract remote data, but expense, danger, or inaccessible locations often stand in the way. This project will address this issue by researching and designing immersive environments that combine remote data with visualisations and new interaction tools for science teams to ....Enabling Situated Immersive Science Collaboration with Remote Sensing Data . This project aims to help scientists communicate and collaborate in immersive environments. Fieldwork is more valuable to scientists than looking at abstract remote data, but expense, danger, or inaccessible locations often stand in the way. This project will address this issue by researching and designing immersive environments that combine remote data with visualisations and new interaction tools for science teams to make sense of spatial and temporal aspects of data. Outcomes will include new presentation and interaction methods, an evaluation with geoscientists, and a framework for designing interactive systems that enable situated interactions. Benefits will include helping Australian scientists overcome distance in their research. Read moreRead less
Framing and Enabling Children’s Active Play using Novel Technology. This project aims to address inactivity in the 3-5 age group through understanding and exploring innovative interactive active play experiences for children, with a view to increasing their physical activity over the long term. This project will be based on empirical research with real children undertaking real interactive experiences in real contexts, in order to understand issues around sustained engagement with these types of ....Framing and Enabling Children’s Active Play using Novel Technology. This project aims to address inactivity in the 3-5 age group through understanding and exploring innovative interactive active play experiences for children, with a view to increasing their physical activity over the long term. This project will be based on empirical research with real children undertaking real interactive experiences in real contexts, in order to understand issues around sustained engagement with these types of systems. We will design and develop solutions that may address the issues and test those interventions in a longitudinal manner. The outcome will be a framework which can be applied in a variety of situations and modalities by designers and developers of such systems, and feed into childhood technology guidelines.
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Ambient nature network: new technologies to connect people to nature. This project aims to reconnect people with nature through new technology. Events in nature occur at times, places and scales that are hard to witness, leading to human disconnection from nature. This project proposes to address this issue by researching and designing new low-cost devices that combine environmental sensors with new interfaces to reveal local nature in parks and gardens in calm, engaging ways within and between ....Ambient nature network: new technologies to connect people to nature. This project aims to reconnect people with nature through new technology. Events in nature occur at times, places and scales that are hard to witness, leading to human disconnection from nature. This project proposes to address this issue by researching and designing new low-cost devices that combine environmental sensors with new interfaces to reveal local nature in parks and gardens in calm, engaging ways within and between homes in medium and high density environments. Outcomes will include new connected devices, playful interfaces and social sharing mechanisms, an evaluation with local groups, and a new theory of technology supported human-nature interaction. Benefits will include better community connection to nature, engagement in local citizen science, environmental initiatives and novel monitoring services and products.Read moreRead less
Coach My Ride: Mentorable Interfaces to support Older Australians' Mobility. This project aims to co-design new interfaces to support older Australians to collaboratively learn the use of automated vehicles. We will seek to understand the needs, expectations, and challenges of urban and rural residents, and the peer support strategies they deploy to learn technology. Mobility is key to the wellbeing of older people, but automated vehicles that are too complex will fail to deliver their promise o ....Coach My Ride: Mentorable Interfaces to support Older Australians' Mobility. This project aims to co-design new interfaces to support older Australians to collaboratively learn the use of automated vehicles. We will seek to understand the needs, expectations, and challenges of urban and rural residents, and the peer support strategies they deploy to learn technology. Mobility is key to the wellbeing of older people, but automated vehicles that are too complex will fail to deliver their promise of independent ageing. Outcomes will be a new theory of collaborative learning and new mentorable interfaces to allow older adults to mentor each other to access and use new mobility solutions. This will contribute to narrow the digital and mobility gap improving the independence, safety and wellbeing of ageing Australians.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200101100
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$425,613.00
Summary
Towards Robotic Empathy: A human centred approach to future AI machines. The project aims to equip future robots with empathy by developing computational models which can leverage from verbal and non-verbal cues. With recent advances in artificial intelligence research, robots now have better cognitive and function skills, but they lack socio-emotional skills. Since these robots are expected to provide assistance to humans across different domains including rehabilitation, education and health c ....Towards Robotic Empathy: A human centred approach to future AI machines. The project aims to equip future robots with empathy by developing computational models which can leverage from verbal and non-verbal cues. With recent advances in artificial intelligence research, robots now have better cognitive and function skills, but they lack socio-emotional skills. Since these robots are expected to provide assistance to humans across different domains including rehabilitation, education and health care, empowering them with empathetic abilities is important for their success. The project will advance fundamental research in machine learning, affective computing and artificial intelligence to model human behavior, personality traits and emotions for an empathetic human-robot interaction.Read moreRead less
An interaction model for human–machine creative collaboration. The project aims to demonstrate how interactive systems can enhance creative productivity, through the development and evaluation of a model for how humans and AI can interact while creating. This is expected to generate new strategies for effective, intelligent, and domain-general creativity support. These new strategies will be validated in the domains of drawing and music composition by rigorous human-centred prototyping technique ....An interaction model for human–machine creative collaboration. The project aims to demonstrate how interactive systems can enhance creative productivity, through the development and evaluation of a model for how humans and AI can interact while creating. This is expected to generate new strategies for effective, intelligent, and domain-general creativity support. These new strategies will be validated in the domains of drawing and music composition by rigorous human-centred prototyping techniques. The principal anticipated outcome of the project is a model for how to enhance creative work through interacting with AI, an opportunity that is currently largely unexplored. Benefits will include an increase in the rate of creative outputs, both within the creative industries and throughout the economy.Read moreRead less