Publications related to Empathetic Conversational Agents for Distress Support

Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models

Transformer models such as GPT generate human-like language and are predictive of human brain responses to language. Here, using functional-MRI-measured brain responses to 1,000 diverse sentences, we first show that a GPT-based encoding model can predict t ...

Nature Portfolio2024

“But of course i’m going to look happy” or “He needed to know I was angry”? Comparing use of emotional labour in teamwork in engineering and hospitality students

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Being able to work effectively in a team is a vital professional skill but how do students in different disciplines, engineering and hospitality, display their emotions when working together? We investigated their self-reported use of emotional labour stra ...

EAPRIL - European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning2024

Amygdala volumes and associations with socio-emotional competencies in preterm youth: cross-sectional and longitudinal data

Laura Ioana Gui, Elda Fischi Gomez, Petra Susan Hüppi, Vanessa Siffredi

Background Socio-emotional difficulties often result from very preterm (VPT) birth. The amygdala's developmental trajectory, including its nuclei, has been recognized as a significant factor in observed difficulties. This study aims to assess the relations ...

Springernature2024

Infusing structured knowledge priors in neural models for sample-efficient symbolic reasoning

Mattia Atzeni

The ability to reason, plan and solve highly abstract problems is a hallmark of human intelligence. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, propelled by deep neural networks, have revolutionized disciplines like computer vision and natural language ...

EPFL2024

Neurobiological and metabolic basis of motivation and effort-based decision-making - A human 1H-MRS, fMRI and machine learning study

Arthur Barakat

Motivation is a multifaceted phenomenon that we explore within the framework of decision-making. Through this cognitive process, actions are directed towards specific goals by performing a trade-off between the cost and benefit of an action. The dorsomedia ...

EPFL2024

How to Support Students to Cultivate Psychological Safety in their Teams

Francesco Mondada, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali

The importance of psychological safety in teams has been demonstrated in different settings. Team performance improves when team climate allows team members to be their authentic selves, to ask questions and raise concerns comfortably. However, it is less ...

EPFL2024

Social-Transmotion: Promptable Human Trajectory Prediction

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Saeed Saadatnejad, Yang Gao, Kaouther Messaoud Ben Amor

Accurate human trajectory prediction is crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and surveillance systems. Yet, existing models often fail to fully leverage the non-verbal social cues human subconsciously communicate when navigating ...

2024

Fly-Swat or Cannon? Cost-Effective Language Model Choice via Meta-Modeling

Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Robert West, Marija Sakota

Generative language models (LMs) have become omnipresent across data science. For a wide variety of tasks, inputs can be phrased as natural language prompts for an LM, from whose output the solution can then be extracted. LM performance has consistently be ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2024

The conceptual foundations of innate immunity: Taking stock 30 years later

Bruno Lemaitre

While largely neglected over decades during which adaptive immunity captured most of the attention, innate immune mechanisms have now become central to our understanding of immunology. Innate immunity provides the first barrier to infection in vertebrates, ...

2024

Augmenting large language models with chemistry tools

Philippe Schwaller, Oliver Tobias Schilter, Andres Camilo Marulanda Bran, Carlo Baldassari

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in tasks across domains but struggle with chemistry-related problems. These models also lack access to external knowledge sources, limiting their usefulness in scientific applications. We introduce ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Monopoly Pricing with Unknown Demand

Thomas Alois Weber

The optimal pricing of goods, especially when they are new and the innovating firm is a monopolist, must proceed without precise knowledge of the demand curve. This paper provides a pricing method with a relative robustness guarantee by maximizing a perfor ...

2025

Generative AI-Enabled Conversational Interaction to Support Self-Directed Learning Experiences in Transversal Computational Thinking

Denis Gillet, Adrian Christian Holzer, Abdessalam Ouaazki, Juan Carlos Farah

As computational thinking (CT) becomes increasingly acknowledged as an important skill in education, self-directed learning (SDL) emerges as a key strategy for developing this capability. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) conversational agents has disrup ...

2024

Adolescent Stress-Induced Ventral Hippocampus Redox Dysregulation Underlies Behavioral Deficits and Excitatory/Inhibitory Imbalance Related to Schizophrenia

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Thamyris Silva

Background and hypothesis: Redox dysregulation has been proposed as a convergent point of childhood trauma and the emergence of psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (SCZ). A critical region particularly vulnerable to environmental insults during ad ...

2024

GELEX: Generative AI-Hybrid System for Example-Based Learning

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Paola Mejia Domenzain, Aybars Yazici, Jibril Albachir Frej

Traditional example-based learning methods are often limited by static, expert-created content. Hence, they face challenges in scalability, engagement, and effectiveness, as some learners might struggle to relate to the examples or find them relevant. To a ...

Association for Computing Machinery2024

Towards Novel Evaluation Methods for Social Dialog Systems

Ekaterina Svikhnushina

Language has shaped human evolution and led to the desire to endow machines with language abilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing enable us to achieve this breakthrough in human-machine interaction. However, introducing conversational ...

EPFL2023

Compassion and Engineering Students’ Moral Reasoning: The Emotional Experience of Engineering Ethics Cases

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Background: There has been an increase in interest in emotion in engineering and science ethics education. There is also evidence that emotional content in case studies may improve students’ learning and enhance awareness, understanding, and motivation con ...

American Society for Engineering Education2023

Technology-Enabled Collaborative Care for Concurrent Diabetes and Distress Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Feasibility Study

Sean Lewis Hill

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the delivery of diabetes care and worsened mental health among many patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). This disruption puts patients with T2D at risk for poor diabetes outcomes, especially those who experience ...

JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC2023

Emotions in Engineering Education

Roland John Tormey

Contrary to common stereotypes, engineering education and practice are not purely rational activities. Emotions, just like cognition, play important roles in teaching, learning, and professional practice. Today, there is a nascent body of research explorin ...

Routledge2023

Harnessing Rule-Based Chatbots to Support Teaching Python Programming Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Adrian Christian Holzer, Juan Carlos Farah

In recent years, the use of chatbots in education has been driven by advances in natural language processing and the increasing availability of digital education platforms. Although the added value of educational chatbots appears promising, researchers hav ...

Springer2023

Modeling Structured Data in Attention-based Models

Alireza Mohammadshahi

Natural language processing has experienced significant improvements with the development of Transformer-based models, which employ self-attention mechanism and pre-training strategies. However, these models still present several obstacles. A notable issue ...

EPFL2023