Brief description of the project:

This project will focus on conversational robots for open-domain dialogue. The aim of the project is personalizing the long-term interaction through a long-term memory. The internship involves preparing and conducting two human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments on the Pepper robot to evaluate the interaction and the memory. The student will be expected to develop an interface through JavaScript and Python to conduct and evaluate dialogue interactions with the robot, based on the state-of-art systems and dialogue corpora.

External modules for face recognition, speech recognition and memory would need to be integrated with the robot for fully embodied and autonomous HRI. The internship requires ability to understand and write scientific articles, and independently conduct real-world experiments. It is a paid full-time internship for 6 months.

This project will be supervised by Bahar Irfan and Alexandre Mazel. Bahar Irfan is an Early-Stage Researcher and a third-year PhD candidate at the CRNS in Plymouth University and SoftBank Robotics Europe, Paris, in the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks project APRIL (http://www.april-robots.org/ ) under the supervision of Prof. Tony Belpaeme (Ghent University) and Dr. Michael Garcia Ortiz (SoftBank Robotics Europe, AILab). Alexandre Mazel is the director of the Software Innovation team in SoftBank Robotics Europe.

Your profil :

* Proficiency in Python and JavaScript
* English proficiency, French is optional
* Understanding of Linux/Unix systems
* Experience with Human-Robot Interaction, AI, Robotics
* (Strongly preferred) Prior experience with NAO or Pepper
* (Optional) Experience in machine learning, speech recognition, dialogue agents

Starting date: As soon as possible
Location: Paris, in SoftBank Robotrics Europe headquarters

The ideal candidate is a master/ engineering student in Computer Science / Machine Learning / Robotics, with good programming skills and passion for human-robot interaction. This position is available only to students due to French law.

Applications can be made immediately and will be considered until the position is fixed.