Field Evaluation with Cognitively-Impaired Older Adults of Attention Management in the Embodied Conversational Agent Louise

International audienceWe present the first experiment we conducted to evaluate the attention monitoring performance of Louise, following a Wizard of Oz method, during the interactions with a cohort of 8 elderly users in a day hospital environment. Louise is a new, semi-automatic prototype of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual character interacting with users through social-like communication, adapted to the special needs of older adults with cognitive impairment; it is intended to ultimately provide assistance in their activities of daily living. We recorded and analyzed both videos of the conversation-like interactions and Louise's tracking data. In our experiment, Louise's attention estimation algorithm achieved about 80% accuracy; moreover, in almost all cases, the user's attention was successfully recaptured by Louise after a planned, experimenter-induced distraction. These results are in line with what was observed in previous experiments involving only younger adults, thus suggesting that attention measurement tools embedded in cognitive prostheses will not need to be adapted to elderly patients. Finally, to gain further insights on conversation management and provide evidence-based suggestions for future work, we performed an anthropological analysis of the whole experiment

A Critical Perspective to Managing Generational Diversity in The Workspace in East Asia

The paper takes a look at the cultural themes that influence behavior and decision-making processes in East Asia, highlighting dimensions of hierarchy, collectivism and saving face. The social constructs that are shaped by these dimensions cultivate an organizational culture that is top-down and group-oriented. To delve into a more meaningful understanding of the generational conflict in East Asia, an analysis of generational theory and the changing work environment provides an insight into the widening generational gap and the domains of tension experienced by those sharing a multi-generational workspace. The author suggests that managing generational diversity has its roots in fostering better understanding of communication patterns practiced by East Asians. Through the facilitation of critical thinking and reflective practices in the workspace, the paper explores initiatives for better communication channels

Explorative Dialogs And Open-Ended Conversations On Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistant responses are typically utilitarian in nature, e.g., answering a query, completing a pre-defined task, etc. However, a substantial amount of virtual assistant queries are exploratory in nature, e.g., they pertain to personality, knowledge, etc. An interactive dialog that enables extended conversation is suitable for such queries. This disclosure describes techniques that enable a virtual assistant to conduct an informational conversation or explore a knowledge domain with a user

A Flexible Schema-Guided Dialogue Management Framework: From Friendly Peer to Virtual Standardized Cancer Patient

A schema-guided approach to dialogue management has been shown in recent work to be effective in creating robust customizable virtual agents capable of acting as friendly peers or task assistants. However, successful applications of these methods in open-ended, mixed-initiative domains remain elusive -- particularly within medical domains such as virtual standardized patients, where such complex interactions are commonplace -- and require more extensive and flexible dialogue management capabilities than previous systems provide. In this paper, we describe a general-purpose schema-guided dialogue management framework used to develop SOPHIE, a virtual standardized cancer patient that allows a doctor to conveniently practice for interactions with patients. We conduct a crowdsourced evaluation of conversations between medical students and SOPHIE. Our agent is judged to produce responses that are natural, emotionally appropriate, and consistent with her role as a cancer patient. Furthermore, it significantly outperforms an end-to-end neural model fine-tuned on a human standardized patient corpus, attesting to the advantages of a schema-guided approach

More Than Just a Party: How the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boosted Participation by Young Adults

Describes an after-hours program designed to boost attendance among young adults and factors contributing to its success, including the elimination of perceptual barriers, encouragement of informal interaction, and exploration of galleries

"Mango Mango, How to Let The Lettuce Dry Without A Spinner?'': Exploring User Perceptions of Using An LLM-Based Conversational Assistant Toward Cooking Partner

The rapid advancement of the Large Language Model (LLM) has created numerous potentials for integration with conversational assistants (CAs) assisting people in their daily tasks, particularly due to their extensive flexibility. However, users' real-world experiences interacting with these assistants remain unexplored. In this research, we chose cooking, a complex daily task, as a scenario to investigate people's successful and unsatisfactory experiences while receiving assistance from an LLM-based CA, Mango Mango. We discovered that participants value the system's ability to provide extensive information beyond the recipe, offer customized instructions based on context, and assist them in dynamically planning the task. However, they expect the system to be more adaptive to oral conversation and provide more suggestive responses to keep users actively involved. Recognizing that users began treating our LLM-CA as a personal assistant or even a partner rather than just a recipe-reading tool, we propose several design considerations for future development.Comment: Under submission to CHI202

Validating a virtual human and automated feedback system for training doctor-patient communication skills

Effective communication between a clinician and their patient is critical for delivering healthcare maximizing outcomes. Unfortunately, traditional communication training approaches that use human standardized patients and expert coaches are difficult to scale. Here, we present the development and validation of a scalable, easily accessible, digital tool known as the Standardized Online Patient for Health Interaction Education (SOPHIE) for practicing and receiving feedback on doctor-patient communication skills. SOPHIE was validated by conducting an experiment with 30 participants. We found that participants who underwent SOPHIE performed significantly better than the control in overall communication, aggregate scores, empowering the patient, and showing empathy ($p < 0.05$ in all cases). One day, we hope that SOPHIE will help make communication training resources more accessible by providing a scalable option to supplement existing resources.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 table