CS Colloquium (Venue changed)

Relational Agents: Social and Communicative Competencies for Maintaining Engagement with Users Over Multiple InteractionsSpeaker: Prof. Timothy Bickmore, Northeastern UniversityHost: Prof. Maja MataricAbstract:Many applications in healthcare, education, sales and games require maintenance of user adherence to a desired interaction usage pattern. In this talk I will present principles and techniques from a number of disciplines for building and maintaining social bonds between users and computer agents. I will discuss applications of these principles to two very different application areas: health communication by a virtual nurse agent for low health literacy patients, and direction giving by an animated robotic tour guide agent in a science museum.Ninety million Americans have low health literacy, resulting in difficulty reading and following written medical instructions. Evidence suggests that face-to-face encounters with a health provider —in conjunction with written instructions—remains one of the best methods for communicating health information to these individuals. I will describe recent work my lab has done in studying human experts explaining written health instructions to individuals with varying degrees of health literacy, and models of the observed verbal and nonverbal behavior that we have incorporated into computer animated agents that can explain health documents to users. I will present results from a series of lab studies on the efficacy of these agents, in addition to two rounds of user testing of a virtual nurse that performs bedside patient education prior to hospital discharge at Boston Medical Center.I will also discuss the development and evaluation of an animated tour guide agent that has been running in the Boston Museum of Science since April that has interacted with over 20,000 visitors. The main challenges we confronted in developing this agent were sensing visitor conversational cues in a very noisy public environment, and re-identifying repeat visitors (using biometrics) so that prior discourse and relational models could be continued.Biography:Timothy Bickmore is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Dr. Bickmore's research focus is on the development of Relational Agents--computational artifacts designed to build long-term social-emotional relationships with their users. These agents have been deployed within the context of behavior change interventions in which they are designed to establish working alliance relationships with patients in order to maximize intervention outcomes. Prior to joining Northeastern, Dr. Bickmore was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Bickmore received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, studying under Profs. Rosalind Picard (Affective Computing) and Justine Cassell (Gesture and Narrative Language).

Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia