ECRobot
ECRobot (Empathy Cognition Robot) — an Intelligent Tutoring System with empathetic feedback design
Sole developer · Sep. 2025 – Dec. 2025
Enterprise Information Systems, 2026; Educational Psychology, under revision
The ECRobot (Empathy Cognition Robot) project investigates the effect of empathetic design on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). The system assists students in completing linguistic puzzles with LLM-generated, empathetic real-time feedback.
I built the entire tutoring system alone:
- An iPad app (Swift) for handwriting input on linguistic puzzles.
- A NAO robot (Qi Python) as the voice-user interface (VUI), letting participants discuss tasks with the robot in real time.
- A FastAPI backend that organizes information and provides feedback.
Contributions
- Designed the student-simulation pipeline, the data analysis, and the evaluation method, and wrote the first draft of the paper. We stress-tested the real-time multimodal system for robustness and used simulated students to examine the effectiveness of the tutor’s feedback (Yueh et al., 2026).
- Instantiated prospect theory as an empathetic feedback algorithm for the robot tutor, deployed in a between-subjects learning experiment with human participants (Yueh et al., 2026).
References
2026
- Adaptive empathy evaluation: an intelligent social robot tutor with multimodal assessmentEnterprise Information Systems, 2026
- Empathic AI-Powered Cognitive Robots as Tutors: Assessing Their Impact on Learning Performance in Accelerated Learning ContextsEducational Psychology, 2026Under revision.