Relational Agents
Relational Agents Group Timothy Bickmore
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Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions, thus Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectations in their interactions with users. Since face-to-face conversation is the primary context of relationship building for humans, this work focuses on relational agents as a specialized kind of embodied conversational agent, which are animated humanoid software agents that use speech, gaze, gesture, intonation and other nonverbal modalities to emulate the experience of human face-to-face conversation. Recent work demonstrated the ability of relational agents to establish and maintain relationships with people over a series of interactions. In this effort, the agent played the role of an exercise advisor designed to motivate users to exercise more. One hundered subjects participated in a six-week study longitudinal study (four week intervention and two week follow up) to determine the efficacy of this agent. Results indicate that the agent was successful at creating and maintaining a trusting, caring relationship with users and increasing their desire to continue interacting with it. Publications: Bickmore, T. "Relational Agents: Effecting Change through Human-Computer Relationships", MIT Ph.D. Thesis, February 2003 [PDF] Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. (to appear) "Establishing and Maintaining Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships" ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (ToCHI). [PDF] Bickmore, T. (to appear) "Unspoken Rules of Spoken Interaction" Communications of the ACM.[PDF] Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. "Subtle Expressivity by Relational Agents", CHI2003 Workshop on Subtle Expressivity for Characters and Robots, (to appear). [PDF] Bickmore, T., Cassell, J.
"Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents" In J. van
Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjaer, and Bickmore, T. "When Etiquette Really Matters: Relational Agents and Behavior Change", AAAI Fall Symposium on Etiquette for Human-Computer Work, 2002 [PDF] Bickmore, T. "Social Dialogue is Serious Business." CHI 2002 Workshop on Socially Adept Technologies. [PDF] Cassell, J. and Bickmore, T. "Negotiated Collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents" User Modeling and Adaptive Interfaces, 12: 1-44. 2002 [PDF] Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J.
"Relational Agents: A Model and Implementation of Building User
Trust." ACM CHI 2001 Conference Proceedings, Cassell, J. and Bickmore, T. “External Manifestations of Trustworthiness in the Interface” Communications of the ACM 43(12). [Abstract] [PDF] Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. "'How
about this weather?' - Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational
Agents." Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Socially Intelligent
Agents.
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