Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

Long-Term Functionality of Rural Water Services in Developing Countries: A System Dynamics Approach to Understanding the Dynamic Interaction of Causal Factors

Research has shown that sustainability of rural water infrastructure in developing countries is largely affected by the dynamic and systemic interactions of technical, social, financial, institutional, and environmental factors that can lead to premature water system failure. This research employs systems dynamic modeling, which uses feedback mechanisms to understand how these factors interact dynamically to influence long-term rural water system functionality. To do this, the research first identified and aggregated key factors from literature, then asked water sector experts to indicate the polarity and strength between factors through Delphi and cross impact survey questionnaires, and finally used system dynamics modeling to identify and prioritize feedback mechanisms. The resulting model identified 101 feedback mechanisms that were dominated primarily by three and four-factor loops that contained some combination of the factors: Water System Functionality, Community, Financial, Government, Management, and Technology. These feedback mechanisms were then scored and prioritized, with the most dominant feedback mechanism identified as Water System Functionality – Community – Finance – Management. This research offers insight into the dynamic interaction of factors impacting sustainability of rural water infrastructure through the identification of these feedback mechanisms and makes a compelling case for future research to longitudinally investigate the interaction of these factors in various contexts

Loans, logins and lasting the course: Academic library use and student retention

Activities and services that improve student engagement and retention in the higher education sector are important not only to individual student’s success but also to university planning and funding. This paper reports on a quantitative study that was carried out to explore whether use of the library by new university students is associated with continued enrolment. Students’ socioeconomic background and age were also examined in relation to library use. Limited to commencing students in March 2010 at Curtin University, the study drew on demographic data from the University’s enrolment system and instances of library use from the Library’s management system. Results of the statistical analyses indicate that library use is associated with retention, and importantly, library use in the early weeks of a student’s first semester is associated with retention. ‘Mature aged’ (21 years and over) students displayed different library use patterns than their younger colleagues and there was some variation in library use between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Findings from this study suggest that academic libraries can contribute to the retention of students and that carefully targeted programs and services may improve library use by some groups of students

Motion Rail: A Virtual Reality Level Crossing Training Application

This paper presents the development and usability testing of a Virtual Reality (VR) based system named 'Motion Rail' for training children on railway crossing safety. The children are to use a VR head mounted device and a controller to navigate the VR environment to perform a level crossing task and they will receive instant feedback on pass or failure on a display in the VR environment. Five participants consisting of two male and three females were considered for the usability test. The outcomes of the test was promising, as the children were very engaging and will like to adopt this training approach in future safety training

How Our Personality Shapes Our Interactions with Virtual Characters - Implications for Research and Development

Abstract. There is a general lack of awareness for the influence of users´ personality traits on human-agent-interaction (HAI). Numerous studies do not even consider explanatory variables like age and gender although they are easily accessible. The present study focuses on explaining the occurrence of social effects in HAI. Apart from the original manipulation of the study we assessed the users ́personality traits. Results show that participants ´ personality traits influenced their subjective feeling after the interaction, as well as their evaluation of the virtual character and their actual behavior. From the various personality traits those traits which relate to persistent behavioral patterns in social contact (agreeableness, extraversion, approach avoidance, self-efficacy in monitoring others, shyness, public self-consciousness) were found to be predictive, whereas other personality traits and gender and age did not affect the evaluation. Results suggest that personality traits are better predictors for the evaluation outcome than the actual behavior of the agent as it has been manipulated in the experiment. Implications for research on and development of virtual agents are discussed

Signals of emotion regulation in a social dilemma: Detection from face and context

In social decision-making tasks, facial expressions are informative signals that indicate motives and intentions. As people are aware that their expressions influence partner behavior, expressions may be strategically regulated in competitive environments to influence a social partner's decision-making. In this work, we examine facial expressions and their strategic regulation within the context of an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Utilizing video-cued rating procedures, we examine several key questions about the functionality of facial expressions in social decision-making. First, we assess the extent to which emotion and expression regulation are accurately detected from dynamic facial expressions in interpersonal interactions. Second, we explore which facial cues are utilized to evaluate emotion and regulation information. Finally, we investigate the role of context in participants' emotion and regulation judgments. Results show that participants accurately perceive facial emotion and expression regulation, although they are better at recognizing emotions than regulation. Using automated expression analysis and stepwise regression, we constructed models that use action units from participant videos to predict their video-cued emotion and regulation ratings. We show that these models perform similarly and, in some cases, better than participants do. Moreover, these models demonstrate that game state information improves predictive accuracy, thus implying that context information is important in the evaluation of facial expressions