A Virtual Laboratory for Studying Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships
The objective of this five-year project, funded through an NSF CAREER grant, is to study how social interface agents can conduct very long-term interactions with users spanning months or years of daily use and the impacts these interactions can have on user education, behavior change and overall well-being. A secondary objective is the development of a networked software architecture and experimental methodology to support very long-term human-computer interaction studies, in which new experiments and agent capabilities can be dynamically integrated into a running system serving a persistent group of human subjects. To be effective in both maintaining long-term interaction and achieving positive task outcomes, the agents developed will need to be able to interact naturally with users, forming social-emotional relationships with them over time. The test domain for this work will be physical activity promotion among urban older adult users. This work is expected to lead to a better understanding of how people and computer agents can optimally live and work together over extended periods of time.
Publications:
- Is the Media Equation a Flash in the Pan? The Durability and Longevity of Social Responses to Computers
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
Pfeifer, L. and Bickmore, T. (2011). PDF - Maintaining Engagement in Long-term Interventions with Relational Agents.
International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents 24(6): 648-666.
Bickmore, T, Schulman, D, Yin, L (2010).PDF - A Virtual Laboratory for Studying Long-term Relationships between Humans and Virtual Agents
Proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), Budapest, Hungary.
Bickmore, T. and Schulman, D. (2009) PDF - Engagement vs. Deceit: Virtual Humans with Human Autobiographies
Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents, Amsterdam.
Bickmore, T., Schulman, D. and Yin, L. (2009) PDF - Should Agents Speak Like, um, Humans? The Use of Conversational Fillers by Virtual Agents
Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents, Amsterdam.
Pfeifer, L. and Bickmore, T. (2009) PDF - Persuading Users through Counseling Dialogue with a Conversational Agent
Proceedings of Persuasive Technology 2009, Claremont, CA.
Schulman, D. and Bickmore, T. (2009) PDF