Using Psychological Characteristics of Situations for Social Situation Comprehension in Support Agents

Support agents that help users in their daily lives need to take into account not only the user's characteristics, but also the social situation of the user. Existing work on including social context uses some type of situation cue as an input to information processing techniques in order to assess the expected behavior of the user. However, research shows that it is important to also determine the meaning of a situation, a step which we refer to as social situation comprehension. We propose using psychological characteristics of situations, which have been proposed in social science for ascribing meaning to situations, as the basis for social situation comprehension. Using data from user studies, we evaluate this proposal from two perspectives. First, from a technical perspective, we show that psychological characteristics of situations can be used as input to predict the priority of social situations, and that psychological characteristics of situations can be predicted from the features of a social situation. Second, we investigate the role of the comprehension step in human-machine meaning making. We show that psychological characteristics can be successfully used as a basis for explanations given to users about the decisions of an agenda management personal assistant agent.Comment: 21 page

Modelling Human Routines: Conceptualising Social Practice Theory for Agent-Based Simulation

Our routines play an important role in a wide range of social challenges such as climate change, disease outbreaks and coordinating staff and patients in a hospital. To use agent-based simulations (ABS) to understand the role of routines in social challenges we need an agent framework that integrates routines. This paper provides the domain-independent Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) framework that satisfies requirements from the literature to simulate our routines. By choosing the appropriate concepts from the literature on agent theory, social psychology and social practice theory we ensure SoPrA correctly depicts current evidence on routines. By creating a consistent, modular and parsimonious framework suitable for multiple domains we enhance the usability of SoPrA. SoPrA provides ABS researchers with a conceptual, formal and computational framework to simulate routines and gain new insights into social systems

Analyzing Creativity in the Light of Social Practice Theory

In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity: a situational creativity that takes place when, starting from a defined situation, a social practice is played; and a creativity of habit that concerns the agents' capacity for generating new practices from habit when the situation is not defined or is unexpected. To test this hypothesis, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Verbal Form A) was analyzed in the light of praxeology, and the results are analyzed in a computational creativity perspective

Contextualized Planning Using Social Practices

Intelligent agents increasingly need to be aware of the social aspects of their context in order to take the appropriate action. How-ever, existing techniques and platforms only provide partial solutions for this problem which do not take into account the full consequences of the social context. In this paper we propose to use ideas from social practice theory to support reasoning about action and planning in a social con- text. We argue that putting social practices at the heart of the deliberation rather than use them as yet another aspect to be taken care of in the practical planning allows for more efficient planning. We provide a sketch of how this architecture provides some structure in the complexity of the deliberation process and balances between pro-active and reactive behaviour. The approach is demonstrated in a scenario taken from emergency management

Contextualized Planning Using Social Practices

Intelligent agents increasingly need to be aware of the social aspects of their context in order to take the appropriate action. How-ever, existing techniques and platforms only provide partial solutions for this problem which do not take into account the full consequences of the social context. In this paper we propose to use ideas from social practice theory to support reasoning about action and planning in a social con- text. We argue that putting social practices at the heart of the deliberation rather than use them as yet another aspect to be taken care of in the practical planning allows for more efficient planning. We provide a sketch of how this architecture provides some structure in the complexity of the deliberation process and balances between pro-active and reactive behaviour. The approach is demonstrated in a scenario taken from emergency management