The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in the use of virtual coaches in healthcare. This paper describes a virtual coach to provide mindfulness meditation training, and the coaching support necessary to begin a regular practice. The coach is implemented as an embodied conversational character, and provides mindfulness training and coaching support via a web-based application. The coach is represented as a female character, capable of showing a variety of affective and conversational expressions, and interacts with the user via a mixed-initiative, text-based, natural language dialogue. The coach adapts both its facial expressions and the dialogue content to the user’s learning needs and motivational state. Findings from a pilot evaluation study indicate that the coach-based training is more effective in helping users establish a regular practice than self-administered training via written and audio materials. The paper concludes with an analysis of the coach features that contribute to these results, discussion of key challenges in affect-adaptive coaching, and plans for future work.

The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was pleased to present the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series, held Wednesday through Friday, March 26–28, 2008 at Stanford University, California. The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The focus of the Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents AAAI symposium was the definition of architectures for intelligent theory-based agents, comprising languages, knowledge representation methodologies, reasoning algorithms, and control loops. The Creative Intelligent Systems Symposium included five major discussion sessions and a general poster session (in which all contributing papers were presented). The purpose of this symposium was to explore the synergies between creative cognition and intelligent systems. The goal of the Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior symposium was to examine fundamental issues in affect and personality in both biological and artificial agents, focusing on the roles of these factors in mediating social behavior. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The goal of the Symbiotic Relationships between the Semantic Web and Software Engineering symposium was to explore how the lessons learned by the knowledge-engineering community over the past three decades could be applied to the bold research agenda of current workers in semantic web technologies. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels. Technical reports of the symposia were published by AAAI Press.