EASEL
EASEL stands for Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning. Within EASEL, HMI develops interactive systems in which robots help children with a learning task. We investigate to what extent the robot can contribute something novel to how the children learn. More in general, EASEL explores and develops a theoretical understanding of human-robot symbiotic interaction (HRSI) where symbiosis is defined as the capacity of the robot and the person to mutually influence each other, and alter each other’s behaviour over different time-scales (for instance, within encounters and across encounters). Symbiosis requires that the robot can read, and be responsive to, the behaviour and emotional state of the person, and adapt its own behaviour to take into account the user social context and extract knowledge from long sequences of behavioural interaction and changing its action responses accordingly.