This Special Issue of AI and Society contains a selection of papers presented at the 6th Social Intelligence Design Workshop held at ITC-irst, Povo (Trento, Italy) in July 2007. Being the 6th in a series means that there now is a well-established and also a growing research area. The interest in this research area is growing because, among other things, current computing technology allows other than the traditional efficiency-oriented applications associated with computer science and interface technology. For example, in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) applications we look at sensor-equipped environments and devices (robots, smart furniture, virtual humans and pets) that support their human inhabitants during their everyday activities. These everyday activities also include computer-mediated communication, collaboration and community activities

Nijholt, A.

Nishida, Toyoaki

Stock, Oliviero

English

A. Nijholt

T. Nishida

Archivio della ricerca - Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Social intelligence design in ambient intelligence

Oliviero Stock

Toyoaki Nishida

Springer - Publisher Connector

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Social intelligence design in ambient intelligence
A. Nijholt Æ Oliviero Stock Æ Toyoaki Nishida
Received: 12 December 2008 / Accepted: 19 December 2008 / Published online: 18 February 2009
 The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
1 Introduction
This Special Issue of AI and Society contains a selection of
papers presented at the sixth Social Intelligence Design
Workshop held at ITC-irst, Povo (Trento, Italy) in July
2007. Being the sixth in a series means that there is a well-
established and also a growing research area now. The
interest in this research area is growing because, amongst
other things, current computing technology allows other
than the traditional efficiency-oriented applications asso-
ciated with computer science and interface technology. For
example, in ambient intelligence (AmI) applications we
look at sensor-equipped environments and devices (robots,
smart furniture, virtual humans and pets) that support their
human inhabitants during their everyday activities. These
everyday activities also include computer-mediated com-
munication, collaboration and community activities.
As first mentioned by Mark Weiser in his now famous
paper ‘The Computer for the 21st Century’ (Weiser 1991):
‘‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear.
They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life
until they are indistinguishable from it.’’
Hence, we talk about computer technology that weaves
itself into the fabric of everyday life. The fabric of future
everyday life includes what we now see around us: other
people, animals, furniture, clothes, walls, and devices that
support us and our children in our daily home, recreational,
office, and mobile activities. In this fabric we will have
intelligent sensors that detect what we are doing, share
knowledge amongst them, and interpret what is going on.
In addition to this ‘invisible’ intelligence embedded in the
environment we will have human-like robots and also
virtual humans displayed in virtual and mixed reality
environments that interact with their human partners in
human-like ways.
Home and other environments, humanoids, and devices
that see, hear, and feel what we are doing will become
familiar with us. They will know about our background and
history, they will know about our preferences, our moods
and emotions, and they will therefore be able to anticipate
what we want. Hence, we enter an era of artificial rational
and social intelligence and of affective and empathic
computing.
Sensor-equipped environments allow implicit and
explicit interaction. We have implicit interaction if the
environment understands and anticipates our actions and
activities. Sensors capture ‘awareness’ information and
provide context-aware feedback or use this awareness
information to provide perceptual seamless access to vir-
tual or mixed reality worlds. Anomalies of daily activities
can be detected and the environment and its devices may
decide to inform or ask the inhabitant about what is going
on, it may autonomously take action to repair or recover
from a certain situation or it may issue a warning to a
monitoring system. Recommender systems may suggest
activities or commands based on preferences of inhabitants
of smart environments.
We need to design and implement interfaces, whether
they are invisible or not. In particular, this design should
A. Nijholt (&)
HMI Group, Department of Computer Science,
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
e-mail: anijholt@cs.utwente.nl
O. Stock
IRST-Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Trento, Italy
e-mail: stock@fbk.eu
T. Nishida
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
e-mail: nishida@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
123
AI & Soc (2009) 24:1–3
DOI 10.1007/s00146-009-0192-7
address the issue of ‘social and natural interaction’ for the
human user. That is, we need to look at verbal and non-
verbal behaviour of humans when they interact with each
other, their children, and their pets. We should understand
what roles are played by gaze, head orientation, gestures,
posture, and verbal interaction and these roles should also
be modelled in order to embed similar capabilities into
synthesized environments and humanoids.
2 Social intelligence design
The central concern of social intelligence design (SID) is
understanding and augmentation of social intelligence that
might be attributed to both an individual and a group. We
consider social intelligence as the necessary ability for
people to relate to understand and interact effectively with
others. The particular concern addressed in the SID
workshops is how Social Intelligence is mediated through
the use of emerging information and communication
technologies.
Integrating, understanding, and designing social intelli-
gence was identified in the first workshop held in Matsue,
Shimane, Japan, in 2001 (Nishida 2001). This first work-
shop, SID 2001, was intended to launch this new
interdisciplinary study. The dual views of social intelli-
gence, an individual’s ability to be able to ‘‘manage
relationship with other agents and act wisely in a situation
governed by an implicit or explicit set of shared rules,
based on an ability of monitoring and understanding of
other agents’ mental state’’ and an ability of a group of
people to manage complexity and learn from experiences
as a function of the design of social structure, were iden-
tified and equally emphasized.
The second workshop, SID 2003, focused on the theo-
ries to enhance the understanding and conceptualization of
human cognition and interpersonal interaction to empha-
size the practical aspects of SID (Fruchter et al. 2005). The
major outcomes of the second workshop include: experi-
mental approach to the design of interactive workspaces,
ethnographic studies of the introduction of technologies,
the building stories methodologies for studying construc-
tion projects, the studies of online communities where
mediated communication is a key vehicle for creating and
maintaining social contact, building an interactive system
that aids human decision and action, an analysis of the
dynamism of the virtual community, and analysis of the
effect of anonymous communication in online community.
The third workshop, SID 2004 (Nijholt and Nishida
2006), distinguished themes such as (1) Natural interac-
tions—covering theory, modelling and analytical
frameworks that have been developed with SID in mind,
including situated computation, embodied conversational
agents, sociable artefacts, socially intelligent robots, (2)
Communities—covering community media, communica-
tion patterns in online communities, knowledge-creating,
network and anonymous communities, (3) Collaboration
Technologies and tools—covering innovations to support
interactions within communities, covering a range from
knowledge sharing systems, multi-agent systems and
interactive systems, and (4) Application Domains—
including design, workspaces, education, e-commerce,
entertainment, digital democracy, digital cities, policy and
business.
The major outcomes of this workshop involved the
analysis of the effect of employing embodied conversa-
tional agents or communicative robots in human–artifact
communication, analysis of presence in distributed work-
spaces, analysis of the effect of long-term use of distributed
workspaces, analysis and modelling of meeting, analysis of
network search activities, and an effort on compensating
digital divide.
The fourth workshop, SID 2005 (Fruchter et al. 2007),
added the multi-disciplinary perspective: exploring SID at
the intersection of different disciplines, such as, people–
place process, place–technology interaction, that brings
technology, work spaces, social behaviours and process
aspects together. The major results involve a theory of
improvisational social acts and communication, extending
SID issues in extreme emergency and regular meeting
room cases, analysis of the weblog community, supporting
knowledge capture, sharing, transfer and reuse in collabo-
rative teams.
Both the fifth SID workshop (Miura and Matsumura
2009) and the sixth workshop (SID 2007) emphasized (1)
Development, operation, and evaluation of support systems
or tools for SID, which includes support systems and tools
both for mediated remote interaction and support for face-
to-face interaction; (2) Observation and modelling of psy-
chological and behavioural processes with the aim of
obtaining computational models of behaviour and interac-
tion; (3) Social intelligence implemented in interfaces,
embodied agents, storytelling environments, (serious)
gaming and simulation.
3 Social intelligence design, ambient intelligence,
(multi-) agent systems
Ten updated versions of papers presented at the SID 2007
workshop held in Trento (Italy) have been selected for
inclusion in this special issue of AI & Society. They reflect
the various viewpoints mentioned above. For example, in
many of the papers various aspects of embedding social
intelligence in individual agents and in multiagents systems
are discussed. These aspects include social judgments,
2 AI & Soc (2009) 24:1–3
123
social interaction and social beliefs. A large group of
papers also assumes the AmI point of view where we have
to deal with disappearing computers and nevertheless we
have to interact with computing technology embedded in
‘the fabrics of everyday life’. This viewpoint rightly
assumes that there is a convergence of AmI (i.e., ubiquitous
computing ? social and intelligent interfaces) and the
developments towards an ‘Internet of Things, People, and
Services’. Here we can find selected SID 2007 papers that
address matters, such as capturing and interpreting human–
humanoid (virtual humans, robotic devices) interaction,
human–human (multi-party) interaction, and human–envi-
ronment interaction.
As mentioned, SID 2007 took place at ITC-irst, Povo
(Trento). We gratefully acknowledge help from ITC-irst in
organizing this workshop. During SID 2007 invited talks
were given on ‘Awareness Systems’ (Panos Markopoulos,
University of Eindhoven), ‘Ontologies and Organisations’
(Nicola Guarino, ISTC-CNR, Trento), and on ‘Monitoring
the Social Attitude of Users in Persuasion Dialogues’
(Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari). We are grateful to
the advisory and program committee and all others that
helped in organizing this workshop.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which per-
mits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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AI & Soc (2009) 24:1–3 3
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Mediated communication in action: a social intelligence design approach.

Understanding mediated communication: the social intelligence design (SID) approach.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.160.4297

Social Intelligence Design in Ambient Intelligence

Social Intelligence Design in Ambient Intelligence

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