Papers by Emilia Barakova
Motivational and emotional disorders (i.e. apathy and depression) are very frequent in dementia a... more Motivational and emotional disorders (i.e. apathy and depression) are very frequent in dementia and might greatly affect the positive psychological state experienced during social HRI. We conducted a six-weeks study in two nursing homes comparing the affective states that two playful activities, board cognitive games and social robot play (Pleo), were able to elicit in people with dementia. Results show that a significant increase in pleasure (positive affect) is present in the robot condition when participants are considered in their totality, but once they are grouped based on the presence of motivational and emotional disorders, the pleasure experienced in the robot condition is significantly lower in the group with such disorders.
Personal and Ubiquitous …, Jan 1, 2010
Products can support user groups in social interaction and/or physical play in various ways. Depe... more Products can support user groups in social interaction and/or physical play in various ways. Depending on the requirements and needs of specific user groups and contexts of use, different approaches are applied to create successful designs. This special issue contains papers that describe designs for children, adults and elderly for sports, home and outdoor contexts. The papers in this issue explore how technology can contribute to enhancing user experiences in terms of social interaction and physical activities. Knowledge from very diverse research areas, such as, social psychology, persuasive technology, child development, human-robot interaction, and creativity is used as an inspiration source for the various projects.
Human-Computer InteractionINTERACT …, Jan 1, 2009
We aim to stimulate social interaction by designing and creating interactive objects for physical... more We aim to stimulate social interaction by designing and creating interactive objects for physical play for diverse user groups, such as children, elderly or people with special needs. With this workshop we aim to bring researchers and practitioners together to share and explore issues and opportunities for technology-enhanced physical play for stimulating face-to-face social interaction (as opposed to virtual interaction through a computer). The focus of this workshop is on sharing theories that are valuable for the design and research of products and applications in this field.
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Jan 1, 2010
This paper describes three design values that we apply for designing playful interactions. Intera... more This paper describes three design values that we apply for designing playful interactions. Interactive play objects can stimulate social interaction and physical play by providing motivating feedback to players' behavior; they can allow players to create their own game goals and rules in an open-ended play context and support social player interaction patterns. This design approach is illustrated by six design cases in which our assumptions were examined in various play contexts. The results show that the application of these design values can lead to rich and appealing innovative play concepts. Players can create a wide range of (physical) games using open-ended play objects, and properties of the play objects, such as being personal or shared, influence the type of social interaction.
This paper presents a framework for parallel tracking of hu- man hands and faces in real time, an... more This paper presents a framework for parallel tracking of hu- man hands and faces in real time, and is a partial solution to a larger project on human-robot interaction which aims at training autistic chil- dren using a humanoid robot in a realistic non-restricted environment. In addition to the framework, the results of tracking dierent hand waving patterns are shown.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010
In this paper game scenarios that aim to establish elements of cooperative play such as imitation... more In this paper game scenarios that aim to establish elements of cooperative play such as imitation and turn taking between children with autism and a caregiver are investigated. Multiagent system of interactive blocks is used to facilitate the games. The training elements include verbal description followed by imitation of video-modeled play episodes. By combining this method with the tangible multiagent platform of interactive blocks (i-blocks) children with autism could imitate play episodes that involved turn taking with a caregiver. The experiment showed that most of the children managed to imitate the play scenarios after video modeling, and repeat the behaviors with the tangible and appealing block platform. When all the actions were well understood by the autistic children, they performed willingly turn taking cooperative behaviors, which they normally do not do.
2011 IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, 2011
Successful results have been booked with using robotics in therapy interventions for autism spect... more Successful results have been booked with using robotics in therapy interventions for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, to make the best use of these robots, the behavior of the robot needs to be tailored to the learning objectives and personal characteristics of each unique individual with ASD. Currently trainers adapt their programs to the situation with each individual client, based on learning plans or the mood of the client. Nonetheless, we cannot expect the trainers to become programmers themselves.
Proceedings of the 2000 International Symposium on Underwater Technology (Cat. No.00EX418), 2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001
The world around us offers continuously huge amounts of information, from which living organisms ... more The world around us offers continuously huge amounts of information, from which living organisms can elicit the knowledge and understanding they need for survival or well-being. A fundamental cognitive feature, that makes this possible is the ability of a brain to integrate the inputs it receives from different sensory modalities into a coherent description of its surrounding environment. By analogy, artificial autonomous systems are designed to record continuously large amounts of data with various sensors. A major design problem by the last is the lack of reference of how the information from the different sensor streams can be integrated into a consistent description. This paper focuses on the development of a sinergistic integration principle, supported by the synchronization of the multimodal information streams on temporal coherence principle. The processing of the individual information streams is done by a self organizing neural algorithm, known as Neural gas algorithm. The integration itself uses a supervised learning method to allow the various information streams to interchange their knowledge as emerged experts. Two complementary data streams, recorded by exploration of autonomous robot of unprepared environments are used to simultaneously illustrate and motivate in a concrete sense the developed integration approach.

Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Interaction design and children - IDC '07, 2007
This paper features the design process, the outcome, and preliminary tests of an interactive toy ... more This paper features the design process, the outcome, and preliminary tests of an interactive toy that expresses emergent behavior and can be used for behavioral training of autistic children, as well as for an engaging toy for every child. We exploit the interest of the autistic children in regular patterns and order to stimulate their motivational, explorative and social skills. As a result we have developed a toy that consists of undefined number of cubes that express emergent behavior by communicating with each other and changing their colors as a result of how they have been positioned by the players. The user tests have shown increased time of engagement of the children with the toy in comparison with their usual play routines, pronounced explorative behavior and encouraging results with improvement of turn taking interaction.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
This paper presents a parallel real time framework for emotion extraction from video fragments of... more This paper presents a parallel real time framework for emotion extraction from video fragments of human movements. Its framework is used for tracking of a waving hand by evaluation of moving skin-colored objects. The tracking analysis demonstrates that acceleration and frequency characteristics of the traced objects are relevant for classification of the emotional expressiveness of human movements. The solution is part of a larger project on interaction between a human and a humanoid robot with the aim of training social behavioral skills to autistic children with robots acting in natural environment.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003
This paper proposes a concept for modeling modalities and understanding the interaction between m... more This paper proposes a concept for modeling modalities and understanding the interaction between modalities through functional brain modeling (FBM). FBM proves to be a powerful method for functional behavior prediction of a group of neuronal cells with equivalent functional behavior. An example of interacting groups of neuronal cells, utilizing FBM, in early vision is given. A broad setup of functional behavior and interaction between different groups of cells in early vision has similar conceptual properties as cells that process other sensory information or multi modal sensory information.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
This paper presents a framework for parallel tracking of human hands and faces in real time, and ... more This paper presents a framework for parallel tracking of human hands and faces in real time, and is a partial solution to a larger project on human-robot interaction which aims at training autistic children using a humanoid robot in a realistic non-restricted environment. In addition to the framework, the results of tracking different hand waving patterns are shown. These patterns provide an easy to understand profile of hand waving, and can serve as the input for a classification algorithm.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004
In analogy to animal research, where behavioral and internal neural dynamics are simultaneously a... more In analogy to animal research, where behavioral and internal neural dynamics are simultaneously analysed, this paper suggests a method for emergent behaviors arising in interaction with the underlying neural mechanism. This way an attempt to go beyond the indeterministic nature of the emergent behaviors of robots is made. The neural dynamics is represented as an interaction of memories of experienced episodes, the current environmental input and the feedback of previous motor actions. The emergent properties can be observed in a two staged process: exploratory (latent) learning and goal oriented learning. Correspondingly, the learning is dominated to a different extent by two factors: novelty and reward. While the reward learning is used to show the relevance of the method, the novelty/familiarity is a basis for forming the emergent properties. The method is strongly inspired by the state of the art understanding of the hippocampal functioning and especially its role in novelty detection and episodic memory formation in relation to spatial context.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005
This paper presents a method for spatial navigation performed mainly on past experiences. The pas... more This paper presents a method for spatial navigation performed mainly on past experiences. The past experiences are remembered in their temporal context, i.e. as episodes of events. The learned episodes form an active autobiography that determines the future navigation behaviour. The episodic and autobiographical memories are modelled to resemble the memory formation process that takes place in the rat hippocampus. The method implies naturally inferential reasoning in the robotic framework that may make it more flexible for navigation in unseen environments. The relation between novelty and life-long exploratory (latent) learning is shown to be important and therefore is incorporated into the learning process. As a result, active autobiography formation depends on latent learning while individual trials might be reward driven. The experimental results show that learning mediated by novelty provides a flexible and efficient way to encode spatial information in its contextual relatedness and directionality. Therefore, performing a novel task is fast but solution is not optimal. In addition, learning becomes naturally a continuous process -encoding and retrieval phase have the same underlying mechanism, and thus do not need to be separated. Therefore, building a "life long" autobiography is feasible.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005
Many cells in cat and monkey visual cortex (area V1 and area 17) respond to gratings and bar patt... more Many cells in cat and monkey visual cortex (area V1 and area 17) respond to gratings and bar patterns of different orientation between center and surround . It has been shown that these cells respond on average 3.3 times stronger to a crossing pattern than to a single bar . In this paper a computational model for a group of neurons that respond solely to crossing patterns is proposed, and has been implemented in visual programming environment TiViPE . Simulations show that the operator responds very accurately to crossing patterns that have an angular difference between 2 bars of 40 degrees or more, the operator responds appropriately to bar widths that are bound by 50 to 200 percent of the preferred bar width and is insensitive to non-uniform illumination conditions, which appear to be consistent with the experimental results.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
This paper proposes a user-friendly framework for designing robot behaviors by users with minimal... more This paper proposes a user-friendly framework for designing robot behaviors by users with minimal understanding of programming. It is a step towards an end-user platform which is meant to be used by domain specialists for creating social scenarios, i.e. scenarios in which not high precision of movement is needed but frequent redesign of the robot behavior is a necessity. We show by a hand shaking experiment how convincing it is to construct robot behavior in this framework.

2009 International IEEE Consumer Electronics Society's Games Innovations Conference, 2009
Multi-agent system of autonomous interactive blocks that can display its active state through col... more Multi-agent system of autonomous interactive blocks that can display its active state through color and light intensity has been developed. Depending on the individual rules, these autonomous blocks could express emergent behaviors which are a basis for various educational games. The multi-agent system is used for developing games for behavioral training of autistic children. This paper features the functional and electronic design of the individual blocks and transformation of the multi-agent system to a platform that allows multiple games to be designed through easy reprogramming of the blocks. Three game concepts that show the type of games that can easily be implemented and reprogrammed are described. The impact of this platform is shortly mentioned in the discussion. The initial tests of using the platform for various educational games are very positive. However, the results of user tests go beyond the scope of this paper and are not discussed in the text that follows.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2010
This paper provides a framework for recording, analyzing and modeling of 3 dimensional emotional ... more This paper provides a framework for recording, analyzing and modeling of 3 dimensional emotional movements for embodied game applications. To foster embodied interaction, we need interfaces that can develop a complex, meaningful understanding of intention-both kinesthetic and emotional-as it emerges through natural human movement. The movements are emulated on robots or other devices with sensory-motor features as a part of games that aim improving the social interaction skills of children. The design of an example game platform that is used for training of children with autism is described since the type of the emotional behaviors depends on the embodiment of the robot and the context of the game. The results show that quantitative movement parameters can be matched to emotional state of the embodied agent (human or robot) using the Laban movement analysis. Emotional movements that were emulated on robots using this principle were tested with children in the age group 7-9. The tests show reliable recognition on most of the behaviors.
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Papers by Emilia Barakova