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Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions

Published: 02 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The term commensality refers to "sharing food and eating together in a social group. In this paper, we hypothesize that it would be possible to have the same kind of experience in a HCI setting, thanks to a new type of interface that we call Artificial Commensal Companion (ACC), that would be beneficial, for example, to people who voluntarily choose or are constrained to eat alone. To this aim, we introduce an interactive system implementing an ACC in the form of a robot with non-verbal socio-affective capabilities. Future tests are already planned to evaluate its influence on the eating experience of human participants.

References

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M. Mancini, R. Niewiadomski, G. Huisman, M. Buijnes, and Gallagher C. P. 2020. Room for one more? - Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions. In CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts. ACM, Honolulu, USA.
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  1. Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions

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    AVI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
    September 2020
    613 pages
    ISBN:9781450375351
    DOI:10.1145/3399715
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 02 October 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. commensality
    2. companion
    3. eating
    4. food
    5. hci
    6. multimodal interaction
    7. nonverbal
    8. robot

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    AVI '20
    AVI '20: International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
    September 28 - October 2, 2020
    Salerno, Italy

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    AVI '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 123 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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