Category: Research

Honorable Paper at CHI2010

Our paper entitled “Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor” received an honorable mentioning from SIGCHI at the CHI2010 conference. This means that our paper has been within the top 5 percent of all full papers. Here is the abstract:

Teaching is inherently a social interaction between teacher and student. Despite this knowledge, many educational tools, such as vocabulary training  programs, still model the interaction in a tutoring scenario as unidirectional knowledge transfer rather than a social dialog. Therefore, ongoing research aims to develop virtual agents as more appropriate media in education. Virtual agents can induce the perception of a life-like social interaction partner that  communicates through natural modalities such as speech, gestures and emotional expressions. This effect can be additionally enhanced with a physical  robotic embodiment. This paper presents the development of social supportive behaviors for a robotic tutor to be used in a language learning application. The effect of these behaviors on the learning performance of students was evaluated. The results support that employing social supportive behavior increases  learning efficiency of students.

Reference:

Saerbeck, M., & Bartneck, C. (2010). Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2010), Atlanta. | DOI: 10.1145/1753326.1753567

The All-In Publication Policy

I presented my paper “The All-In Publication Policy” at the ICDS2010 conference. The video of the presentation is now available:

Abstract: The productivity of scientists and the quality of their papers differ enormously. Still, all papers written get published eventually and the impact factor of the publication channel is not correlated to the citations that individual papers receive. Hence it does not matter where to publish papers. Based on these two conjectures, I conclude that all papers should be published. The review process should focus on feedback that helps authors to improve their manuscripts. But we should no longer waste effort to a selection procedure. This All-In policy would decrease the number of published papers and would refocus the attention of the authors on the quality of their papers and not their quantity.

An Efficient Publication Process

An Efficient Publication Process from Christoph Bartneck on Vimeo.

In this video, we introduce an efficient publication process. It starts with structuring thoughts, and assembling all the elements in a text editor. Next, we demonstrate how manage references and how to include figures. Last, we demonstrate the usage of Latex to automatically layout a document.

Open Access publishing at Springer as a member of TU/e

Today I was very pleased when I submitted my manuscript to Springer. I received the following notice:

Open Access at no cost to authors due to institutional arrangement
You’ve identified yourself as affiliated to the Eindhoven University of Technology. A special arrangement between Springer-SBM and the Eindhoven University of Technology – Netherlands allows all articles from affiliated authors to be published as Open Access, and any payments for Open Access will be automatically covered by that arrangement.

It is great that the Universities in the Netherlands have come to an agreement with Springer!