Are you being addressed?: real-time addressee detection to support remote participants in hybrid meetings

A meeting assistant agent for (remote) participants in hybrid meetings has been developed. Its task is to monitor the meeting conversation and notify the user when he is being addressed. This paper presents the experiments that have been performed to develop machine classifiers to decide if “You are being addressed��? where “You��? refers to a fixed (remote) participant in a meeting. The experimental results back up the choices made regarding the selection of data, features, and classification methods. We discuss variations of the addressee classification problem that have been considered in the literature and how suitable they are for addressing detection in a system that plays a role in a live meeting

What do care robots reveal about technology?

Ethical issues raised by the idea of social robots that care point at a fundamental difference between man and machine. What sort of “difference‿ is this? We propose a semiotic view on technology to clarify the relations users have with social robots. Are these autonomous agents just promising or can we also count on them

Feedback presentation for mobile personalised digital physical activity coaching platforms

User interface design and feedback are important in personalised behavior change support systems. This paper discusses two service platforms that monitor user’s physical activity through wearable sensors and that present the user personalised feedback. Important principles for effectiveness of such systems are personalisation or tailoring, context- awareness, feedback and interaction. We focus here on the presentation of feedback to the user. We present results of a number of short and long term user studies in which we compare different forms of feedback presentation: text, graphics and with or without an anthropomorphic graphical talking character. Results show that although some users like the talking character they don’t have a positive effect on adherence to the activity program. The outcomes of the user evaluations support our beliefs that personal motivation is of primary importance for the effectiveness of these systems. Technical challenges ahead are to support more personal and context-aware feedback, more variations as well as the possibility for more interaction with the coaching system

Computational models of social and emotional turn-taking for embodied conversational agents: a review

The emotional involvement of participants in a conversation not only shows in the words they speak and in the way they speak and gesture but also in their turn-taking behavior. This paper reviews research into computational models of embodied conversational agents. We focus on models for turn-taking management and (social) emotions. We are particularly interested in how in these models emotions of the agent itself and those of the others in uence the agent's turn-taking behavior and vice versa how turn-taking behavior of the partner is perceived by the agent itself. The system of turn-taking rules presented by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is often a starting point for computational turn-taking models of conversational agents. But emotions have their own rules besides the "one-at-a-time" paradigm of the SSJ system. It turns out that almost without exception computational models of turn-taking behavior that allow "continuous interaction" and "natural turntaking" do not model the underlying psychological, affective, attentional and cognitive processes. They are restricted to rules in terms of a number of supercially observable cues. On the other hand computational models for virtual humans that are based on a functional theory of social emotion do not contain explicit rules on how social emotions affect turn-taking behavior or how the emotional state of the agent is affected by turn-taking behavior of its interlocutors. We conclude with some preliminary ideas on what an architecture for emotional turn-taking should look like and we discuss the challenges in building believable emotional turn-taking agents

Inter-usability and the Presentation of Multi-modal Feedback for Physical Activity and Diabetic Type II Patients

In the EU Artemis project Smarcos we developed a personal attentive system that supports users in attaining a healthy lifestyle. The system is a persuasive system. Persuasive systems, and especially behaviour change support systems (BCSS) are information systems designed to form, alter or reinforce attitudes, behaviours or an act of complying without using deception, coercion or inducements. BCSS support people in their daily life by providing support by means of a human or digital coach. These systems can support users in coping with chronic diseases like COPD and diabetics, but also to be more physical active