Papers

This paper describes an application of the conversational agent Max in a real-world setting. The agent is employed as guide in a public computer museum, where he engages with visitors in natural face-to-face communication, provides them with information about the museum or the exhibition, and conducts natural small talk conversations. The design of the system is described with a focus on how the conversational behavior is achieved. Logfiles from interactions between Max and museum visitors were... Read more

Rapid increases in agent technology as well as the movement of computing into more and more social transactions has increased the need for embodied interface agents. However, interaction designers currently lack sufficient guidelines to confidently and successfully design the visual form of these agents. In this paper we offer a summary of research on the visual form of agents. In addition, we present our own study that explores the relationships between an agents visual form, the... Read more

In this paper we describe a commercial platform for the development of net environments, virtual spaces inhabited by avatars which have been created and are subsequently visited and instructed by users via the Internet. The platform allows extensive data collection. Which data are collected and the scope of analysis will be explained on a theoretical level and by examples from data sets collected from different applications. Read more

The objective of this chapter is to identify the common knowledge and practice in research methodology and to apply it to the field of software evaluation, especially of embodied conversational agents. Relevant issues discussed are: how to formulate a good research question, what research strategy to use, which data collection methods are most appropriate and how to select the right participants. Reliability and validity of the data sets are dealt with and finally the chapter... Read more

The Affective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, offering the user with an affective multimodal interaction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an ‘affective guide with attitude’ that links its memories and visitor’s interest to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen. This paper presents a review of related work, the system in detail, challenges and the... Read more

Imagine a future world where humans and machines will be involved in joint activities requiring social skills. This paper presents an overview of the dawnings of this world, concentrating on chatterbots – computer programs which engage the user in written conversation – and their users. Driving upon Clark’s theory of Language and the psychological theory of self-categorisation by Turner, it presents an analysis of social reactions to chatterbots and a taxonomy of the technology. The... Read more

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of verbal abuse in spontaneous human-chatterbot conversations. An ethnographic study suggested that abuse is pervasive and may reflect an asymmetrical power distribution, where the user is the master, and the chatterbot the slave. We propose that verbal aggression in this setting may be a social norm applied by users to differentiate themselves from the machine in what can be regarded as a form of interspecies conflict. The findings stress... Read more

At most institutions, medical students learn communication skills through the use of standardized patients (SP’s). Virtual patients (VP’s) may offer several advantages over SP’s, but little data exists regarding the use of VP’s in teaching communication skills. Therefore, we report our initial efforts to create an interactive virtual clinical scenario of a patient with acute abdominal pain to teach medical students history-taking and communication skills. Read more

In this paper, we describe our current work in developing a computer-based educational tool for Occupational Therapy students learning client evaluation techniques. The software is dialog-based and allows the student to interact with a virtual client. Students carry out an evaluation, following the appropriate procedures and assessing both the client’s physical and emotional state as they proceed. Students’ actions are saved to a file for instructor and self evaluation of their performance. The software is... Read more

Training of social interaction skills, particularly for emotionally charged situations is becoming increasingly critical in many professions. In cases such as the medical field, however, conventional real-world or role-playing training is extremely limited or even impossible. An example for this is the treatment of injured children. Therefore, we have developed an e-learning system that uses virtual agent technology to simulate the treatment of and human interaction with a hurt, upset boy and his emotional, easily... Read more