 |
I am a Research Fellow in the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. Before this, I worked in the Robotics and Embedded Systems Group at the Technical University of Munich and in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
My primary research interest is embodied communication. In particular, I am interested in designing, implementing, and evaluating practical systems supporting embodied interaction with human users, such as embodied conversational agents and multimodal and human-robot dialogue systems.
I am currently working mainly on JAMES, a European FP7 project that has the goal of developing a robot agent that is able to interact in a socially appropriate way in multi-party, situated interactions in a bartender domain. I have previously worked on the following projects:
- ECHOES (EPSRC/ESRC TEL; 2009-2012), which developed a technology-enhanced learning environment in which both typically developing children and children with Asperger's Syndrome could explore and improve their social interaction and collaboration skills.
- JAST (EU FP6; 2006-2009), which investigated the cognitive, neural, and communicative aspects of joint action.
- COMIC (EU FP5; 2002-2005), where we developed an embodied multimodal dialogue system.
 |
Publications
Here are some recent publications:
- Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. User preferences can drive facial expressions: evaluating an embodied conversational agent in a recommender dialogue system. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 20, Number 4, pages 341--381, October 2010. doi:10.1007/s11257-010-9080-6 [ Bib | Pdf (unofficial preprint) ]
- Mary Ellen Foster, Katerina Avramides, Sara Bernardini, Jingying Chen, Christopher Frauenberger, Oliver Lemon, and Kaska Porayska-Pomsta. Supporting Children's Social Communication Skills through Interactive Narratives with Virtual Characters. In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2010, Florence, October 2010. doi:10.1145/1873951.1874163 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Manuel Giuliani, Mary Ellen Foster, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Situated Reference in a Hybrid Human-Robot Interaction System. In Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2010) Trim, Ireland, July 2010. acl:W10-4207 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, and Alois Knoll. Comparing Objective and Subjective Measures of Usability in a Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore, August 2009. acl:P09-1099 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Evaluating Description and Reference Strategies in a Cooperative Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of IJCAI-09, Pasadena, California, July 2009. http://ijcai.org/papers09/Papers/IJCAI09-302.pdf [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster. Automated metrics that agree with human judgements on generated output for an embodied conversational agent. In Proceedings of INLG 2008, Salt Fork, Ohio, June 2008. acl:W08-1113 [ Bib | Pdf ]
- Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Corpus-based generation of head and eyebrow motion for an embodied conversational agent. Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 41, Numbers 3--4, pages 305--323, December 2007. doi:10.1007/s10579-007-9055-3. [ Bib | Pdf (unofficial preprint) ]
Please see my full list of publications for more details.
Personal
Anyone wanting to stalk me can probably find out all they need from my Facebook, Academia.Edu, and LinkedIn profiles and my (largely defunct) blog, so I don't think I need to write much more here. For now, I'll just include a list of links to other interesting pages on the net, along with some older pages that I created a while ago and keep around for sentimental interest.
People
- Ron Petrick, my husband, currently working as a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Check out our wedding website!
- Dad
Pastimes
- When I have time, I enjoy countryside walking, running, cycling, swimming, triathlon, and British Military Fitness.
- I maintain several packages in the Fedora Linux distribution.
- I was the captain of the Edinburgh team on the 2001-2002 series. of University Challenge.