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In Proc. of Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), Los Angeles, California, July 15-18, 2022. 

Monitoring daily activities is essential for home service robots to take care of the older adults who live alone in their homes. In this article, we proposed a sound-based human activity monitoring (SoHAM) framework by recognizing sound events in a home environment. First, the method of context-aware sound event recognition (CoSER) is developed, which uses contextual information to disambiguate sound events. The locational context of sound events is estimated by fusing the data from the distributed passive infrared (PIR) sensors deployed in the home. A two-level dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is used to model the intratemporal and intertemporal constraints between the context and the sound events. Second, dynamic sliding time window-based human action recognition (DTW-HaR) is developed to estimate active sound event segments with their labels and durations, then infer actions and their durations. Finally, a conditional random field (CRF) model is proposed to predict human activities based on the recognized action, location, and time. We conducted experiments in our robot-integrated smart home (RiSH) testbed to evaluate the proposed framework. The obtained results show the effectiveness and accuracy of CoSER, action recognition, and human activity monitoring. 

We present a novel method that automatically measures quality of sentential paraphrasing. Our method balances two conflicting criteria: semantic similarity and lexical diversity. Using a diverse annotated corpus, we built learning to rank models on edit distance, BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity features. Extrinsic evaluation on STS Benchmark and ParaBank Evaluation datasets resulted in a model ensemble with moderate to high quality. We applied our method on both small benchmarking and large-scale datasets as resources for the community. 

Social robots are coming to our homes and have already been used to help humans in a number of ways in geriatric care. This article aims to develop a framework that enables social robots to conduct regular clinical screening interviews in geriatric care, such as cognitive evaluation, falls' risk evaluation, and pain rating. We develop a social robot with essential features to enable clinical screening interviews, including a conversational interface, face tracking, an interaction handler, attention management, robot skills, and cloud service management. Besides, a general clinical screening interview management (GCSIM) model is proposed and implemented. The GCSIM enables social robots to handle various types of clinical questions and answers, evaluate and score responses, engage interviewees during conversations, and generate reports on their well-being. These reports can be used to evaluate the progression of cognitive impairment, risk of falls, pain level, and so on by caregivers or physicians. Such a clinical screening capability allows for early detection and treatment planning in geriatric care. The framework was developed and implemented on our 3-D-printed social robot. It was tested on 30 older adults with different ages, achieved satisfying results, and received their high confidence and trust in the use of this robot for human well-being assessment.