UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
		 COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

		   "The Role of Affect in Imitation"

			   Arnaud Blanchard
		     (School of Computer Science,
		     University of Hertfordshire)


			  13 December 2006

			  Lecture Theatre E350
		       Hatfield, College Lane Campus
			       3 - 4 pm

	       Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available.
			  [Catering Permitting]

		    Everyone is Welcome to Attend
			  [Space Permitting]



Abstract:

Imitation is a common process appearing very early in development of
infants. It seems an essential process to learn, socialize and
communicate. However it is not trivial to reproduce this phenomenon in
robotics; one of the main difficulty is to make robots decide when and
what to imitate. Interesting low-level imitation architectures in
robotics have been proposed (Andry, Gaussier, Demiris, ...), they
address how a robot can imitate but not when it should imitate.

However, psychological studies (Dunn, Hatfield, Nadel...) have shown
that affect has strong effect on exploratory and imitative behaviors
and we studied how affect can be used in robotics to modulate
behaviors.  I will present our architecture to produce different kinds
of basic behaviors (seeking for stability, exploration, exploitation)
modulated using affect and show how it can be used to produce low-level
imitation modulated by affect. I will finally present our solution to
overcome a limitation of our continuous approach that makes it
difficult to remember two different situations at a time.
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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq