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darkfeline writes:

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-robot-influent-attention.html

Researchers at the Interactions and Communication Design (ICD) Lab at Toyohashi University of Technology have devised the novel robotic communication approach that takes into account the listener's attention. The robot follows a person's gaze and determines if that person is distracted by, for instance, a sports event in the background or something in their surroundings. The robot bends forward and nods if the person is watching television or it turns its head and looks around if the person is looking elsewhere. These behaviors are accompanied by appropriate utterances intended to regain the person's attention. Experiments have confirmed that these adaptive interactions considerably increase the other party's attention focused toward the robot as compared with the gestures and speech generated without considering the person's gaze.

[Ed. addition] Some gestures are not universal. You nod your head up and down for agreement; left and right for disagreement. Right? Not in Bulgaria where the meanings are reversed. What gestures have had unintended meanings in your experience? Which are universal? Is a smile recognized everywhere as a signal of happiness? How can one design the system to handle both the recognition and use of gestures depending on the person the robot is talking to?

Original Submission