Designing friends

Embodied Conversational Agents are virtual humans that can interact with humans using verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In most cases, they have been designed for short interactions. This paper asks the question how one would start to design synthetic characters that can become your friends. We look at insights from social psychology and propose a methodology for designing friends

Attending boarding school: a longitudinal study of its role in students’ academic and non-academic outcomes

Attending boarding school has long been a part of the educational culture in Australia. For a significant number of students, boarding is a necessity due to distance from suitable schools or potential lack of resources in remote or regional areas. For other students, attending boarding school represents a choice and access to greater educational resources. Research conducted to date has been limited to relatively few boarding schools or to relatively narrow outcome measures. As a result, this research has not comprehensively assessed the role of boarding school in the outcomes of students. Guided by theories and perspectives of ecological systems, positive youth development (PYD), extracurricular activity, attachment, and experiential education, it is proposed that boarding school represents a unique socialisation setting in comparison to home or day school experiences. In the current study, structural equation modelling was used to explore the extent to which boarders—relative to day students—may gain or decline in academic (e.g., motivation, engagement) and non-academic (e.g., life satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, self-esteem) outcomes. Quantitative survey data were collected from high school students at 12 schools across Australia in each of two successive years. Cross-sectional data, controlling for socio-demographic, prior achievement, personality, and school-level factors, showed general parity in outcomes between day and boarding students; however, where significant effects emerged, they tended to favour boarders. Longitudinal analysis, which controlled for prior variance, socio-demographic, prior achievement, personality, and school-level factors, also revealed general parity in day and boarding students’ gains and declines in academic and non-academic outcomes. In fact, any differences between day and boarding students appeared to be due to personality traits, prior achievement, and some socio-demographic features. Unlike historical accounts of predominantly negative experiences of attending boarding school, the current study found no such negative effects on outcomes measured. Taken together, these findings hold implications for boarders, parents considering boarding school for their children, staff involved with day and boarding students, and researchers investigating the effect of school structures on students’ academic and non-academic development. Importantly, given the lack of rigorous research and theory in this area, the current study provides a foundation for more detailed and well-designed longitudinal research into residential education settings in the future

Attending boarding school: a longitudinal study of its role in students’ academic and non-academic outcomes

Attending boarding school has long been a part of the educational culture in Australia. For a significant number of students, boarding is a necessity due to distance from suitable schools or potential lack of resources in remote or regional areas. For other students, attending boarding school represents a choice and access to greater educational resources. Research conducted to date has been limited to relatively few boarding schools or to relatively narrow outcome measures. As a result, this research has not comprehensively assessed the role of boarding school in the outcomes of students. Guided by theories and perspectives of ecological systems, positive youth development (PYD), extracurricular activity, attachment, and experiential education, it is proposed that boarding school represents a unique socialisation setting in comparison to home or day school experiences. In the current study, structural equation modelling was used to explore the extent to which boarders—relative to day students—may gain or decline in academic (e.g., motivation, engagement) and non-academic (e.g., life satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, self-esteem) outcomes. Quantitative survey data were collected from high school students at 12 schools across Australia in each of two successive years. Cross-sectional data, controlling for socio-demographic, prior achievement, personality, and school-level factors, showed general parity in outcomes between day and boarding students; however, where significant effects emerged, they tended to favour boarders. Longitudinal analysis, which controlled for prior variance, socio-demographic, prior achievement, personality, and school-level factors, also revealed general parity in day and boarding students’ gains and declines in academic and non-academic outcomes. In fact, any differences between day and boarding students appeared to be due to personality traits, prior achievement, and some socio-demographic features. Unlike historical accounts of predominantly negative experiences of attending boarding school, the current study found no such negative effects on outcomes measured. Taken together, these findings hold implications for boarders, parents considering boarding school for their children, staff involved with day and boarding students, and researchers investigating the effect of school structures on students’ academic and non-academic development. Importantly, given the lack of rigorous research and theory in this area, the current study provides a foundation for more detailed and well-designed longitudinal research into residential education settings in the future

Evaluating embodied conversational agents in multimodal interfaces

Based on cross-disciplinary approaches to Embodied Conversational Agents, evaluation methods for such human-computer interfaces are structured and presented. An introductory systematisation of evaluation topics from a conversational perspective is followed by an explanation of social-psychological phenomena studied in interaction with Embodied Conversational Agents, and how these can be used for evaluation purposes. Major evaluation concepts and appropriate assessment instruments – established and new ones – are presented, including questionnaires, annotations and log-files. An exemplary evaluation and guidelines provide hands-on information on planning and preparing such endeavours

Building Embodied Conversational Agents:Observations on human nonverbal behaviour as a resource for the development of artificial characters

"Wow this is so cool!" This is what I most probably yelled, back in the 90s, when my first computer program on our MSX computer turned out to do exactly what I wanted it to do. The program contained the following instruction: COLOR 10(1.1) After hitting enter, it would change the screen color from light blue to dark yellow. A few years after that experience, Microsoft Windows was introduced. Windows came with an intuitive graphical user interface that was designed to allow all people, so also those who would not consider themselves to be experienced computer addicts, to interact with the computer. This was a major step forward in human-computer interaction, as from that point forward no complex programming skills were required anymore to perform such actions as adapting the screen color. Changing the background was just a matter of pointing the mouse to the desired color on a color palette. "Wow this is so cool!". This is what I shouted, again, 20 years later. This time my new smartphone successfully skipped to the next song on Spotify because I literally told my smartphone, with my voice, to do so. Being able to operate your smartphone with natural language through voice-control can be extremely handy, for instance when listening to music while showering. Again, the option to handle a computer with voice instructions turned out to be a significant optimization in human-computer interaction. From now on, computers could be instructed without the use of a screen, mouse or keyboard, and instead could operate successfully simply by telling the machine what to do. In other words, I have personally witnessed how, within only a few decades, the way people interact with computers has changed drastically, starting as a rather technical and abstract enterprise to becoming something that was both natural and intuitive, and did not require any advanced computer background. Accordingly, while computers used to be machines that could only be operated by technically-oriented individuals, they had gradually changed into devices that are part of many people’s household, just as much as a television, a vacuum cleaner or a microwave oven. The introduction of voice control is a significant feature of the newer generation of interfaces in the sense that these have become more "antropomorphic" and try to mimic the way people interact in daily life, where indeed the voice is a universally used device that humans exploit in their exchanges with others. The question then arises whether it would be possible to go even one step further, where people, like in science-fiction movies, interact with avatars or humanoid robots, whereby users can have a proper conversation with a computer-simulated human that is indistinguishable from a real human. An interaction with a human-like representation of a computer that behaves, talks and reacts like a real person would imply that the computer is able to not only produce and understand messages transmitted auditorily through the voice, but also could rely on the perception and generation of different forms of body language, such as facial expressions, gestures or body posture. At the time of writing, developments of this next step in human-computer interaction are in full swing, but the type of such interactions is still rather constrained when compared to the way humans have their exchanges with other humans. It is interesting to reflect on how such future humanmachine interactions may look like. When we consider other products that have been created in history, it sometimes is striking to see that some of these have been inspired by things that can be observed in our environment, yet at the same do not have to be exact copies of those phenomena. For instance, an airplane has wings just as birds, yet the wings of an airplane do not make those typical movements a bird would produce to fly. Moreover, an airplane has wheels, whereas a bird has legs. At the same time, an airplane has made it possible for a humans to cover long distances in a fast and smooth manner in a way that was unthinkable before it was invented. The example of the airplane shows how new technologies can have "unnatural" properties, but can nonetheless be very beneficial and impactful for human beings. This dissertation centers on this practical question of how virtual humans can be programmed to act more human-like. The four studies presented in this dissertation all have the equivalent underlying question of how parts of human behavior can be captured, such that computers can use it to become more human-like. Each study differs in method, perspective and specific questions, but they are all aimed to gain insights and directions that would help further push the computer developments of human-like behavior and investigate (the simulation of) human conversational behavior. The rest of this introductory chapter gives a general overview of virtual humans (also known as embodied conversational agents), their potential uses and the engineering challenges, followed by an overview of the four studies

Building Embodied Conversational Agents:Observations on human nonverbal behaviour as a resource for the development of artificial characters

"Wow this is so cool!" This is what I most probably yelled, back in the 90s, when my first computer program on our MSX computer turned out to do exactly what I wanted it to do. The program contained the following instruction: COLOR 10(1.1) After hitting enter, it would change the screen color from light blue to dark yellow. A few years after that experience, Microsoft Windows was introduced. Windows came with an intuitive graphical user interface that was designed to allow all people, so also those who would not consider themselves to be experienced computer addicts, to interact with the computer. This was a major step forward in human-computer interaction, as from that point forward no complex programming skills were required anymore to perform such actions as adapting the screen color. Changing the background was just a matter of pointing the mouse to the desired color on a color palette. "Wow this is so cool!". This is what I shouted, again, 20 years later. This time my new smartphone successfully skipped to the next song on Spotify because I literally told my smartphone, with my voice, to do so. Being able to operate your smartphone with natural language through voice-control can be extremely handy, for instance when listening to music while showering. Again, the option to handle a computer with voice instructions turned out to be a significant optimization in human-computer interaction. From now on, computers could be instructed without the use of a screen, mouse or keyboard, and instead could operate successfully simply by telling the machine what to do. In other words, I have personally witnessed how, within only a few decades, the way people interact with computers has changed drastically, starting as a rather technical and abstract enterprise to becoming something that was both natural and intuitive, and did not require any advanced computer background. Accordingly, while computers used to be machines that could only be operated by technically-oriented individuals, they had gradually changed into devices that are part of many people’s household, just as much as a television, a vacuum cleaner or a microwave oven. The introduction of voice control is a significant feature of the newer generation of interfaces in the sense that these have become more "antropomorphic" and try to mimic the way people interact in daily life, where indeed the voice is a universally used device that humans exploit in their exchanges with others. The question then arises whether it would be possible to go even one step further, where people, like in science-fiction movies, interact with avatars or humanoid robots, whereby users can have a proper conversation with a computer-simulated human that is indistinguishable from a real human. An interaction with a human-like representation of a computer that behaves, talks and reacts like a real person would imply that the computer is able to not only produce and understand messages transmitted auditorily through the voice, but also could rely on the perception and generation of different forms of body language, such as facial expressions, gestures or body posture. At the time of writing, developments of this next step in human-computer interaction are in full swing, but the type of such interactions is still rather constrained when compared to the way humans have their exchanges with other humans. It is interesting to reflect on how such future humanmachine interactions may look like. When we consider other products that have been created in history, it sometimes is striking to see that some of these have been inspired by things that can be observed in our environment, yet at the same do not have to be exact copies of those phenomena. For instance, an airplane has wings just as birds, yet the wings of an airplane do not make those typical movements a bird would produce to fly. Moreover, an airplane has wheels, whereas a bird has legs. At the same time, an airplane has made it possible for a humans to cover long distances in a fast and smooth manner in a way that was unthinkable before it was invented. The example of the airplane shows how new technologies can have "unnatural" properties, but can nonetheless be very beneficial and impactful for human beings. This dissertation centers on this practical question of how virtual humans can be programmed to act more human-like. The four studies presented in this dissertation all have the equivalent underlying question of how parts of human behavior can be captured, such that computers can use it to become more human-like. Each study differs in method, perspective and specific questions, but they are all aimed to gain insights and directions that would help further push the computer developments of human-like behavior and investigate (the simulation of) human conversational behavior. The rest of this introductory chapter gives a general overview of virtual humans (also known as embodied conversational agents), their potential uses and the engineering challenges, followed by an overview of the four studies