Casey Kennington
Papers
10
Total Citations
236
H-Index
6
About
Casey Kennington is a leading voice in the field of spoken dialogue systems and human-robot interaction, with a career dedicated to making robots truly conversational partners. His research focuses on the critical challenges of situated, incremental, and multimodal language understanding—enabling robots to process speech word-by-word while simultaneously attending to visual and social cues. Kennington’s most influential work, a 2021 article with over 100 citations, provides a roadmap for the future of spoken language interaction with robots, highlighting the gap between current capabilities and societal needs. He is also the creator of OpenDial, an open-source toolkit for building probabilistic dialogue systems that has been cited over 70 times and widely adopted by the research community. Beyond technical frameworks, Kennington explores the social dimensions of interaction, investigating how people perceive robot emotions, age, and educational level. His work on the Cozmo robot platform has been particularly notable for probing how affective displays and language ability shape human interpretations. With a portfolio spanning from probabilistic dialogue management to affective computing, Kennington’s research is essential reading for anyone building robots that must understand, respond to, and collaborate with people in real time.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Spoken language interaction with robots: Recommendations for future research106 citations · 2021
- 2
- 3rrSDS: Towards a Robot-ready Spoken Dialogue System15 citations · 2020
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- 5Predicting Human Interpretations of Affect and Valence in a Social Robot10 citations · 2019
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- 7Probabilistic multiparty dialogue management for a game master robot6 citations · 2014
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- 9
- 10Symbol, Conversational, and Societal Grounding with a Toy Robot2 citations · 2017