This work presents a general-purpose character reasoning model intended for usage by autonomous team actors that are acting as believable characters (e.g., human team actors fall into this category). The idea is that selecting a cast of believable characters can predetermine a solution to an unexpected challenge that the team may be facing in a rescue mission. This approach in certain cases proves more efficient than an alternative approach based on rational decision making and planning, which ignores the question of character believability. This point is illustrated with a simple numerical example in a virtual world paradigm.

To deceive involves corrupting the predictions or explanations of others. A deeper understanding of how this works thus requires modeling how human abduction and prediction operate. This paper proposes that most human abduction and prediction are carried out via analogy, over experience and generalizations constructed from experience. I take experience to include cultural products, such as stories. How analogical reasoning and learning can be used to make predictions and explanations is outlined, along with both the advantages of this approach and the technical questions that it raises. Concrete examples involving deception and counter-deception are used to explore these ideas further.

With advancements in technology, smartphones can already serve as memory aids. Electronic calendars are of great use in time-based memory tasks. In this project, we enter the mixed reality realm for helping dementia patients. Dementia is a general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life. Memory loss is an example. Here, mixed reality refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new episodic memory visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time. Cognitive models are approximations of a patient's mental abilities and limitations involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering). External representations of episodic memory help patients and caregivers coordinate their actions with one another. We advocate distributed cognition, which involves the coordination between individuals, artefacts and the environment, in four main implementations of artificial intelligence technology in the Kognit storyboard: (1) speech dialogue and episodic memory retrieval; (2) monitoring medication management and tracking an elder's behaviour (e.g., drinking water); (3) eye tracking and modelling cognitive abilities; and (4) serious game development towards active memory training. We discuss the storyboard, use cases and usage scenarios, and some implementation details of cognitive models and mixed reality hardware for the patient. The purpose of future studies is to determine the extent to which cognitive enhancement technology can be used to decrease caregiver burden.

In typical human interactions, nonverbal behaviors such as eye gazes and gestures serve to augment and reinforce spoken communication. To use similar nonverbal behaviors in human-robot interactions, researchers can apply artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning, cognitive modeling, and computer vision. But knowledge of nonverbal behavior can also benefit artificial intelligence: because nonverbal communication can reveal human mental states, these behaviors provide additional input to artificial intelligence problems such as learning from demonstration, natural language processing, and motion planning. This article describes how nonverbal communication in HRI can benefit from AI techniques as well as how AI problems can use nonverbal communication in their solutions.

For humans and automation to effectively collaborate and perform tasks, all participants need access to a common representation of potentially relevant situational information, or context. This article describes a general framework for building context-aware interactive intelligent systems that comprises three major functions: (1) capture human-system interactions and infer implicit context; (2) analyze and predict user intent and goals; and (3) provide effective augmentation or mitigation strategies to improve performance, such as delivering timely, personalized information and recommendations, adjusting levels of automation, or adapting visualizations. We then describe our current work towards a general platform that supports developing context-aware applications in a variety of domains. We then explore an example use case illustrating how our framework can facilitate personalized collaboration within an information management and decision support tool.

For humans and automation to effectively collaborate and perform tasks, all participants need access to a common representation of potentially relevant situational information, or context. This article describes a general framework for building context-aware interactive intelligent systems that comprises three major functions: (1) capture human-system interactions and infer implicit context; (2) analyze and predict user intent and goals; and (3) provide effective augmentation or mitigation strategies to improve performance, such as delivering timely, personalized information and recommendations, adjusting levels of automation, or adapting visualizations. Our goal is to develop an approach that enables humans to interact with automation more intuitively and naturally that is reusable across domains by modeling context and algorithms at a higher-level of abstraction. We first provide an operational definition of context and discuss challenges and opportunities for exploiting context. We then describe our current work towards a general platform that supports developing context-aware applications in a variety of domains. We then explore an example use case illustrating how our framework can facilitate personalized collaboration within an information management and decision support tool. Future work includes evaluating our framework.

In this paper we assess our progress toward creating a virtual human negotiation agent with fluid turn-taking skills. To facilitate the design of this agent, we have collected a corpus of human-human negotiation roleplays as well as a corpus of Wizard-controlled human-agent negotiations in the same roleplay scenario. We compare the natural turn-taking behavior in our human-human corpus with that achieved in our Wizard-of-Oz corpus, and quantify our virtual human's turn-taking skills using a combination of subjective and objective metrics. We also discuss our design for a Wizard user interface to support real-time control of the virtual human's turn-taking and dialogue behavior, and analyze our wizard's usage of this interface.

We present the SimSensei system, a fully automatic virtual agent that conducts interviews to assess indicators of psychological distress. We emphasize on the perception part of the system, a multimodal framework which captures and analyzes user state for both behavioral understanding and interactional purposes.

We present an approach to incorporate interesting and compelling characters in planning-based narrative generation. The approach is based on a computational model that utilizes character actions to portray these as having distinct and well-defined personalities.

This paper presents an exploratory study conducted to understand how audio-visual prompts are understood by people on an emotional level as a first step towards the more challenging task of designing emotionally aligned prompts for persons with cognitive disabilities such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Persons with ADRD often need assistance from a caregiver to complete daily living activities such as washing hands, making food, or getting dressed. Artificially intelligent systems have been developed that can assist in such situations. This paper presents a set of prompt videos of a virtual human ‘Rachel’, wherein she expressively communicates prompts at each step of a simple hand washing task, with various human-like emotions and behaviors. A user study was conducted for 30 such videos with respect to three basic and important dimensions of emotional experience: evaluation, potency, and activity. The results show that, while people generally agree on the evaluation (valence: good/bad) of a prompt, consensus about power and activity is not as socially homogeneous. Our long term aim is to enhance such systems by delivering automated prompts that are emotionally aligned with individuals in order to help with prompt adherence and with long-term adoption.