Planning-Based Social Partners for Children with Autism

This paper describes the design and implementation of a planning-based socially intelligent agent built to help young children with Autism Spectrum Conditions acquire social communication skills. We explain how planning technology allowed us to satisfy the requirements relating to the agent's design that we identified through our consultations with children and carers as well as our review of best practices for autism intervention. We discuss the design principles we implemented, the engineering challenges we faced and the lessons we learned in building the pedagogical agent. We conclude by presenting extensive experimental results concerning the agent's efficacy.