The use of a humanoid robot for older people with dementia in aged care facilities

This paper presents an interdisciplinary PhD project using a humanoid robot to encourage interactive activities for people with dementia living in two aged care facilities. The aim of the project was to develop software and use technologies to achieve successful robot-led engagement with older people with dementia. This paper outlines the qualitative findings from the project's feasibility stage. The researcher's observations, the participants' attitudes and the feedback from carers are presented and discussed.

A Comparative Study of Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

Question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) has become a popular approach to help users extract information from knowledge bases. Although several systems exist, choosing one suitable for a particular application scenario is difficult. In this article, we provide a comparative study of six representative KBQA systems on eight benchmark datasets. In that, we study various question types, properties, languages, and domains to provide insights on where existing systems struggle. On top of that, we propose an advanced mapping algorithm to aid existing models in achieving superior results. Moreover, we also develop a multilingual corpus COVID-KGQA, which encourages COVID-19 research and multilingualism for the diversity of future AI. Finally, we discuss the key findings and their implications as well as performance guidelines and some future improvements. Our source code is available at \url{https://github.com/tamlhp/kbqa}.

Model-Agnostic and Diverse Explanations for Streaming Rumour Graphs

The propagation of rumours on social media poses an important threat to societies, so that various techniques for rumour detection have been proposed recently. Yet, existing work focuses on \emph{what} entities constitute a rumour, but provides little support to understand \emph{why} the entities have been classified as such. This prevents an effective evaluation of the detected rumours as well as the design of countermeasures. In this work, we argue that explanations for detected rumours may be given in terms of examples of related rumours detected in the past. A diverse set of similar rumours helps users to generalize, i.e., to understand the properties that govern the detection of rumours. Since the spread of rumours in social media is commonly modelled using feature-annotated graphs, we propose a query-by-example approach that, given a rumour graph, extracts the $k$ most similar and diverse subgraphs from past rumours. The challenge is that all of the computations require fast assessment of similarities between graphs. To achieve an efficient and adaptive realization of the approach in a streaming setting, we present a novel graph representation learning technique and report on implementation considerations. Our evaluation experiments show that our approach outperforms baseline techniques in delivering meaningful explanations for various rumour propagation behaviours.