The long-term vision of socially interactive humanoid robots requires machines that can engage with humans through their bodies, adapting in real time to a partner's movement, intent, and ability level. Like an embodied ChatGPT, this problem requires generating appropriate motion responses to an active participant whose behavior cannot be scripted or predicted; further, the responses must carry social meaning, appropriate to the context, the partner, and the shared interaction. In this talk, we will explore human intent understanding and humanoid motion generation across multiple nonverbal dynamic modalities, including face, gesture, prosody and trajectory. I'll discuss how our lab has investigated the nebulous concept of “context’ and explore how it modulates the way that humans express themselves, as well as how it changes how expressions are perceived. We focus especially on generative models and tasks with subjective evaluations, towards robots that are acceptable to humans in society.

Angelica Lim is an associate professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Director of the ROSIE Lab (Robots with Social Intelligence and Empathy). Her research envisions an AI future where machines understand and adapt to the richness of human communication. She develops artificial intelligence models of nonverbal communication, including facial expressions, body gestures and speech prosody, to build empathic, context-aware and compassionate machines. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration with psychologists, cognitive scientists, clinicians and neuroscientists, advancing responsible and human-centered robotics. She and her team have received the Best Paper in Entertainment Robotics and Cognitive Robotics Awards at IROS 2011 and 2022, and Best Demo and LBR at HRI 2021 and 2023. Dr. Lim has been featured by the BBC, TEDx, and Forbes’ 20 Leading Women in AI, and she hosted a television documentary on robotics. She is the creator of the SFU CS Teaching Toolkit, the author of Python Practice Lab (Princeton Univ. Press), and has received multiple teaching awards at the university level.