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We have recently published two publications describing our latest research efforts in ROILA. We hope to provide PDF’s of camera ready versions as soon as possible.

– Mubin, O., Shahid, S., & Bartneck, C. (2013). Robot Assisted Language Learning through Games: A Comparison of Two Case Studies. In Edutainment: Special Issue of Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, pp 9-14. [PDF]

– Mubin, O., Henderson, J., & Bartneck, C. (2013). Talk ROILA to your Robot. Demo Paper in the 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2013).

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Here is the video recording of Omar’s PhD defense that took place on June 1st in Eindhoven. We apologize for the bad quality of the video which is mainly due to the dark lighting of the room.

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The thesis “ROILA – Robot Interaction Language” has been printed. Please join us for the defense on June 1st, 16:00h in lecture theater 4 of the Auditorium at the Eindhoven University of Technology. This will be followed by a reception in Senaatszaal.

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Recently we concluded the first ever ROILA course at the Huygens College Eindhoven. The course lasted for three weeks and was taught to 100 Dutch high school students students spread over 4 classes. The lessons involved practicing ROILA and playing with LEGO robots. All of us (teachers and students included) had alot of fun. So much so the school wants to make it a permanent part of their Science curriculum. They plan to do a repeat of the course for another class in January next year. A follow-on controlled experiment was also conducted which compared the efficacy of learning ROILA to control a robot vs controlling English-savvy robot. ROILA was found to better on both subjective and objective accounts (details coming soon).

We would like to thank the staff and teachers of Huygens College Eindhoven for their support and appreciation. Needless to say the children deserve a special mention too.

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We will be continously updating the ROILA academy section as we progress with the ROILA course at Huygens College, Eindhoven. Please visit the academy to know more about the course and our efforts at the school.

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We were pleased to be a part of the IceTAL 2010 conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where we presented our work on ROILA. The published version of the paper is now available in the publications section. Needless to say we also had great fun exploring Reykjavik and the natural beauty of Iceland (see pictures below of the Church of Hallgrímur, the Gullfoss Waterfall and the Strokkur Geysir).

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We were pleased to present ROILA and its demo recently on two separate occassions. The first was on June 21, when an internationl review board visited our department of industrial design to evaluate the quality of research done here. As part of their visitation we had the honour of presenting ROILA and also gave a working demo about it. A similar demo was given on July 6 (see video below), when the staff of Philips Research Eindhoven visited our deparment as part of research collaboration activities.

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We are pleased to inform that we have had a paper on ROILA accepted to the 7th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (IceTAL 2010). We hope to be actively involved in the conference scheduled to take place in Reykjavik, Iceland. We will upload the final version of the paper in due course.

It was an inspiring visit to the LEGO Mindstorms headquarters in Billund Denmark. We exchanged in a very positive and encouraging discussion with several members of the LEGO Mindstorms team.  We presented ROILA including its motivation, design objectives and our initial experimental results. We informed them that we were now ready for application case studies, LEGO being one and autistic children being another option (actually LEGO considered the autism line very interesting as well). In addition, we gave a successful demo that showed the language in use with a NXT robot and ‘turtle’ semantics. In summary, the LEGO Mindstorms team was very enthusiastic about the project and we had a lively debate. Best of all, LEGO Mindstorms promised to help us and that they would publicize the ROILA project on their website and we promised to provide them with material to do that.

On April 13th we were invited to participate in the one day LEGO Idea Conference 2010. We attended various inspiring workshops and lectures such as the lecture by Nicholas Negroponte on the one laptop per children initiative. Moreover, several speakers emphasized the importance of open ended play, creativity, learning by construction for children (and this could be an interesting element in our application case study, i.e. can children co-create the ROILA language?)

 

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We are looking for potential participants for our upcoming evaluation of ROILA using LEGO NXT robots. Our user group is primarily children ranging from the ages of 12 and above up till roughly 15. They must be fluent in Dutch and/or English. Their involvement will comprise of two phases: a learning phase and the actual evaluation session. In the learning phase children would be expected to devote 20 hours to ROILA education and once they would be completely skilled they would bring the language in practice in an evaluation session with a LEGO robot somewhere in the summers, we hope to finalize a date soon. We aim to reward all our participants with a significant token of appreciation.

Feel free to contact us if you might know a school or anyone else that would be interested or even if you just want to try out ROILA.

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