Virtual Assistents and their Social Acceptability (VASA)
Ramin Yaghoubzadeh and Stefan KoppThe VASA project develops a personalizable and adaptive conversational agent to be used as a daily companion for older people and people with cognitive impairments. The project is a cooperation with the v. Bodelschwingh Foundation Bethel, the renowned diaconal hospital located in Bielefeld.
Outline
VASA investigates the requirements and capabilities of cognitive interaction
technology for assisting people with special needs in everyday situations.
This is mediated by a virtual agent, which offers an intuitive and natural
interaction with the technical system; conversation replaces difficult
manual handling processes. Moreover, the agent embodies the system's 'identity',
generating a social presence, which increases the acceptance of system-generated
suggestions, facilitates a perception of personalized assistance, and enables
the perception of continued interaction with the agent as a mutual
familiarization process.
In particular, VASA will ensure the setup of a stable interaction system
for elderly people in cooperation with v. Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel, providing a multi-modal interface
for informing and discussing about the daily schedule and an interface for
video communication with care personnel and relations.
As a platform, a conversational virtual character is combined with an intuitive touch-screen interface
for disambiguation of uncertain topics.
VASA will first investigate the personalization capabilities in this
interaction paradigm, and, subsequently, long-term effects of agent-side
initiative and the application of increasingly certain user preferences
on the trust in this quotidian companion agent.
Previous publications
Yaghoubzadeh, R. & Kopp, S. (2011). "Creating familiarity through adaptive behavior generation in human‐agent interaction". In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2011), pp. 195-201, Reykjavík, Iceland.
Yaghoubzadeh, R. (2011). "FamCHAI: An Adaptive Calendar Dialogue System". In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2011), pp. 458-461, Girona, Spain.
Schlangen, D., Baumann, T., Buschmeier, H., Kopp, S., Skantze, G., & Yaghoubzadeh, R. (2010). Middleware for incremental processing in conversational agents. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2010: the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group in Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 51–54, Tokyo, Japan.
Sadeghipour, A., Yaghoubzadeh, R., Rüter, A., & Kopp, S. (2009). "Social motorics - towards an embodied basis of social human-robot interaction". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Centered Robot Systems (HCRS 2009), pp. 193-203, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany.
Software
IPAACA – Incremental Processing Architecture for Artificial Conversational Agents
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