Socially Intelligent Agents: The Human in the Loop:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium
Kerstin Dautenhahn, Chair
November 3-5, 2000, North Falmouth, Massachusetts
Technical Report FS-00-04
182 pp., $35.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-127-6
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The highly interdisciplinary area of socially intelligent agents has attracted a number of active researchers who model, design and analyze agents (software or robotic), which behave socially. Much of this work is strongly inspired by forms of natural social intelligence characteristic of humans. This symposium addressed recent technological, methodological and theoretical developments in the field of socially intelligent agents (SIA's), and discussed social and cultural issues, and limitations and problems of socially intelligent agents. A focus was the "human-in-the-loop." Both agents and humans can have different roles during agent-human interaction, e.g. as designers, users, observers, assistants, collaborators, competitors, customers, or friends. The symposium concentrated primarily on SIA's that are either directly interacting with humans, showing aspects of human-style intelligence, supporting interaction among humans and/or modeling explicitly aspects of human social intelligence. The symposium focused on four key themes for which considerations of the "human-in-the-loop" are crucial: Connecting to SIA's: architectures and design spaces for SIA's; innovative user- interfaces, novel environments and new methodologies for software and robotic agents interacting and collaborating with humans and facilitating communication and collaboration between humans; hot approaches (emotional, empathic aspects) and cold approaches (intention and plan ascription, reasoning etc.); synchronization in human-agent dialogue; the role of embodiment in human-agent interaction; exploiting anthropomorphism; believability and degrees of agent complexity Learning and playing with SIA's: new applications of social agent technology in rehabilitation and education; SIA's as instructors, guides, teachers, assistants and friends; SIA's which support human creativity and imagination; SIA's in living environments (e.g. at school, at home, at work, on holiday, at meeting points) Living with SIA's: social agent technology which influences attitudes/opinions/ behavior; issues of "social relationships" between human and agent e.g. helping, competition and cooperation, autonomy and control, predictability, deception, manipulation, initiative, delegation, responsibility, conflicts Growing up and evolving with SIA's: social agent technology which empowers humans, addressing the cognitive and emotional needs of humans; impact of SIA's on human society and culture; agents adapting to and supporting cultural diversity; ethical considerations.