“CybSPEED: Cyber-Physical systems and social robots in education for people with special needs”
organized by
- Manuel Graña (Email: manuel.grana@ehu.es) Affiliation: University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain
- Maya DImitrova, (Email: dimitrova.iser@gmail.com) Affiliation: Institute of Robotics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
- Vassilis Kaburlasos, (Email: vgkabs@teiemt.gr) Affiliation: EMaTTech, Kavala, Greece
Scope of the Special Session :
The education & pedagogical rehabilitation frameworks have emerged recently yet have been employed widely for implementing information technology and robotics in clinics and special education. Robots interacting with children are being considered in several EU funded projects, both completed and ongoing. Some projects designed scenarios for long-term interaction with social robots of children with diabetes in hospital settings. Other focus on modelling mixed human-robot societies. Ongoing projects use NAO and Probo (elephant robot) to communicate and help in building social skills to children with autism. These projects emphasise the clinical relevance of robotic technology whereas we place the technology in the broader context of pedagogical and social communication in standard and special education. Intrinsic motivations are being modelled some FP7 projects, where agents – animals, humans and robots – are guided by internal drives for entertainment and socialization being more sophisticated than the basic survival drives. The intrinsic motivation is the attraction of a cognitive system to novelty, thereby sustaining learning and self-improvement in the course of life.
CybSPEED special session is a direct result of the CybSPEED european project starting this year, which emphasizes a similar to the intrinsic-motivation approach to learning by designing human-robot situations (games, pedagogical cases, and artistic performances) and advanced interfaces (brain-computer, eye-gaze tracking and virtual reality) where children and students interact with the novel technology to enhance the underlying self-compensation and complementarity of brain encoding during learning.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to :
- Social robotics in education
- Adaptive and all life learning social robotics
- Social robotics for autism spectrum children
- Perception of social robotics in educational environments
- Sensing and acting of social robots in educational milieu
- Storytelling and acting
- Hybrid social robotics and other media (marionettes)
- Social robotics dialog in educational environments
- Teaching social robots
- Measuring the impact of social robots in educational environments