FaceBots: the world’s first robots that utilize & publish FaceBook info
"FaceBots" is one of the two major research projects of the Interactive Robots and Media Lab, that was founded and is being directed by Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis. The purpose of the project is to build robots that can create more meaningful and sustainable longer-term relationships with humans through usage of references to shared memories and to shared friends in dialogues. The first such robot prototype is Sarah the FaceBot, which can detect and recognize faces, recognize and synthesize speech and perform simple dialogues, and has an on-board interaction database (holding past meetings) and a social database (holding friendship information). Furthermore, she is equipped with a real-time connection to the FaceBook website, which she uses to gather friendship, status and minifeed information for her friends; and which she also uses to automatically update her own webpage with information about her meetings. FaceBots were awarded prestigious Microsoft-award funding, being one of 8 projects funded for Microsoft's HRI CFP, out of 74 proposals. The other award recipients were proposals from MIT, Yale etc. Videos, papers, and other material follows below:
Public Appearances and Demonstrations
FaceBots were exhibited in Techkriti 2010, IIT Kanpur's prestigious technology festival in India, which hosts multiple exhibitions and talks by nobel laurates etc. The robot had conversations with 30 or so students, and made many new friends! More details can be found here.
Selected Papers and Other Material
N. Mavridis, M. Petychakis et al., "FaceBots: Shared Memories and Shared Friends towards meaningful long-term HRI", CogSys 2010
N. Mavridis, "Robot Friends: Artificial Agents entering Human Social Networks", in book "The Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites", Routledge, New York, 2010
N. Mavridis, W. Kazmi and P. Toulis, "Friends with Faces: How Social Networks Can Enhance Face Recognition and Vice Versa", in book "Computational Social Networks Analysis: Trends, Tools and Research Advances", Springer Verlag, 2009 (click here for pdf)
N. Mavridis, W. Kazmi, P. Toulis, C. Ben-AbdelKader, "On the synergies between online social networking, Face Recognition, and Interactive Robotics", CaSoN 2009 (click here for pdf)
N. Mavridis, C. Datta et al, "Facebots: Social robots utilizing and publishing social information in Facebook", IEEE HRI 2009
N. Mavridis, S. Emami et al.: "Facebots: Embodied Conversational Social Robots", TEE Robotics Conference 2009