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PhD Defense - Elnaz Nouri
Wed, Dec 23, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Cultural Computational Agents
PhD Candidate: Elnaz Nouri
Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 10:30 AM PDT
Place: SAL 213
People's cultural background influences how they make decisions. Faced with the same set of choices in the same tasks, people from different cultures tend to make different decisions. Cultural variations in behavior play an influential role in how interpersonal interactions unfold. Therefore, computational agents designed for interacting with people in social interactions (such as virtual humans that are used for training and negotiation) need to be sensitive to culture in order to be effective. The majority of the existing computational decision making models do not account for the observed cultural variations in behavior. This thesis proposes how models of culture-specific decision making can be created using information about the values of people from a culture, and that thses models can be used to support the decision making of computational agents in simulating behavior of people from a specific culture. The Multi Attribute Relational Values model (called MARV) assumes that decisions are evaluated based on a set of social and relational considerations. Different approaches for developing the decision making models within the MARV framework based on the availability of different sources of information on the culture are explored and compared with one another. An online interactive web framework is implemented that allows inter-cultural and intra-cultural behavioral data among users and computational agents collection through crowdsourcing platforms. It is shown that the culture-sensitive decision making models enable the virtual agents to simulate, predict and appropriately respond to the behavior of people from different cultures.
Committee:
Prof. David Traum (chair)
Prof. Paul Rosenbloom
Prof. Morteza Dehghani
Prof. Jerry Hobbs
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
