Actors, Avatars and Agents: Potentials and Implications of Natural Face Technology for the Creation of Realistic Visual Presence

We are on the cusp of creating realistic, interactive, fully rendered human faces on computers that transcend the “uncanny valley,” widely known for capturing the phenomenon of “eeriness” in faces that are almost, but not fully realistic. Because humans are hardwired to respond to faces in uniquely positive ways, artificial realistic faces hold great promise for advancing human interaction with machines. For example, realistic avatars will enable presentation of human actors in virtual collaboration settings with new levels of realism; artificial natural faces will allow the embodiment of cognitive agents, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, putting us on a path to create “artificial human” entities in the near future. In this conceptual paper, we introduce natural face technology (NFT) and its potential for creating realistic visual presence (RVP), a sensation of presence in interaction with a digital actor, as if present with another human. We contribute a forward-looking research agenda to information systems (IS) research, comprising terminology, early conceptual work, concrete ideas for research projects, and a broad range of research questions for engaging with this emerging, transformative technology as it becomes available for application. By doing so, we respond to calls for “blue ocean research” that explores unchartered territory and makes a novel technology accessible to IS early in its application. We outline promising areas of application and foreshadow philosophical, ethical, and conceptual questions for IS research pertaining to the more speculative phenomena of “living with artificial humans.

Do teacher judgment accuracy and teacher feedback predict student achievement in elementary and middle-school science?

The quest to find the most effective approach to teach science has challenged teachers and scholars for decades (Ford, 2012; Kuhn, 2010a; Duschl, Schweingruber, & Shouse, 2007). Unfortunately, the recent push for quality science education in schools has not yet resulted in higher achievement on standardized science assessments in the United States. The increased focus on science in school and the lack of growth on national and international standardized assessment has led to reformed-based policies, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), that ask teachers to teach in a way that emulates the practices of scientific inquiry, including argument-based inquiry. Current literature suggests that using dialogic feedback is an effective way to promote scientific argumentation in classrooms (Chin, 2007), yet we know very little about what teachers need to know in order to provide effective dialogic feedback in an argument-based inquiry classroom. A type of knowledge that may be essential for teachers to access and use, especially when providing feedback, is one about which little is known: teachers’ task-specific knowledge of learners’ understanding of science concepts. In this study, I used a method for capturing this type of teacher knowledge and explored its relationship to instructional decision-making and, ultimately, to student achievement in science. Specifically, I examined the links among teachers’ knowledge of students’ understanding of scientific concepts, the type of feedback teachers gave, and students’ science achievement outcomes in classrooms that encourage argument-based inquiry. Teachers’ knowledge of science learners was measured using a teacher judgment accuracy task. Teachers in the study predicted how well their students would perform on specific items on a science assessment. To tap into teachers’ instructional decision making, the dialogic feedback they provided in a video-taped science lesson was measured using an observational coding scheme developed for this study. Thirty-three third-through eighth-grade teachers in two moderate-size school districts in the mid-west United States participated in the study. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships among the variables, and dialogic feedback was found to be a significant predictor of student outcomes on the science section of the Iowa Assessments, accounting for a large amount of the variance in those scores. Judgment accuracy was not a significant predictor of student outcomes and accounted for much less variance in the scores than did dialogic feedback. Interaction effects were investigated through separate moderation and mediation analyses, and neither produced statistically significant results. Results of this study are discussed in terms of their potential to provide insights into teacher knowledge of learners and an instructional decision-making practice (dialogic feedback). These results have the potential to add to our understanding of teachers’ knowledge of learners, its relationship to instructional decision making, and its role in student achievement. Implications for both preservice teacher education and inservice professional development are discussed

To Affinity and Beyond: Interactive Digital Humans as a Human Computer Interface

The field of human computer interaction is increasingly exploring the use of more natural, human-like user interfaces to build intelligent agents to aid in everyday life. This is coupled with a move to people using ever more realistic avatars to represent themselves in their digital lives. As the ability to produce emotionally engaging digital human representations is only just now becoming technically possible, there is little research into how to approach such tasks. This is due to both technical complexity and operational implementation cost. This is now changing as we are at a nexus point with new approaches, faster graphics processing and enabling new technologies in machine learning and computer vision becoming available. I articulate the issues required for such digital humans to be considered successfully located on the other side of the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley. My results show that a complex mix of perceived and contextual aspects affect the sense making on digital humans and highlights previously undocumented effects of interactivity on the affinity. Users are willing to accept digital humans as a new form of user interface and they react to them emotionally in previously unanticipated ways. My research shows that it is possible to build an effective interactive digital human that crosses the Uncanny Valley. I directly explore what is required to build a visually realistic digital human as a primary research question and I explore if such a realistic face provides sufficient benefit to justify the challenges involved in building it. I conducted a Delphi study to inform the research approaches and then produced a complex digital human character based on these insights. This interactive and realistic digital human avatar represents a major technical undertaking involving multiple teams around the world. Finally, I explored a framework for examining the ethical implications and signpost future research areas

Evaluating digital policy interventions: studies in violence prevention, deradicalization, and investor protection

Social media platforms allow individuals without great technical knowledge or financial capital to spread violent content and radical messages among a large audience, bypassing traditional media. As violence and radical actions cause significant economic damage and undermine democratic institutions, security agencies have responded by using the same platforms to target at-risk individuals with their prevention programs. The literature has shown that such online programs can be effective in reducing victimization and perpetration rates. However, despite the large number of programs implemented, there is a significant lack of rigorous impact evaluations. This thesis contributes to the literature by developing a conceptual framework for evaluating the impact and economic efficiency of online programs for crime prevention in general. Furthermore, it contributes by evaluating the impact of two online programs in the areas of violence prevention and deradicalization. To reassess the impact of such online programs in a different prevention context, the thesis also evaluates a measure for investor protection in the context of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency

Modeling behavior dynamics using computational psychometrics within virtual worlds

In case of fire in a building, how will people behave in the crowd? The behavior of each individual affects the behavior of others and, conversely, each one behaves considering the crowd as a whole and the individual others. In this article, I propose a three-step method to explore a brand new way to study behavior dynamics. The first step relies on the creation of specific situations with standard techniques (such as mental imagery, text, video, and audio) and an advanced technique [Virtual Reality (VR)] to manipulate experimental settings. The second step concerns the measurement of behavior in one, two, or many individuals focusing on parameters extractions to provide information about the behavior dynamics. Finally, the third step, which uses the parameters collected and measured in the previous two steps in order to simulate possible scenarios to forecast through computational models, understand, and explain behavior dynamics at the social level. An experimental study was also included to demonstrate the three-step method and a possible scenario

Virtual Reality and the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Adults and Children

In this review, the neural underpinnings of the experience of presence are outlined. Firstly, it is shown that presence is associated with activation of a distributed network, which includes the dorsal and ventral visual stream, the parietal cortex, the premotor cortex, mesial temporal areas, the brainstem and the thalamus. Secondly, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is identified as a key node of the network as it modulates the activity of the network and the associated experience of presence. Thirdly, children lack the strong modulatory influence of the DLPFC on the network due to their unmatured frontal cortex. Fourthly, it is shown that presence-related measures are influenced by manipulating the activation in the DLPFC using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) while participants are exposed to the virtual roller coaster ride. Finally, the findings are discussed in the context of current models explaining the experience of presence, the rubber hand illusion, and out-of-body experiences