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EgoChat Agent 99

apply EgoChat to a large community over a network and evaluate the amount
of knowledge created in the community. In such an application, EgoChat has
the merit of being able to deal with large amounts of data.
We foresee a lot of potential application areas, including campus communi-
ties made up of professors and students, knowledge management in a company,
local commercial communities, and communities of volunteers. Currently, the
EgoChat system is used in a public opinion channel (POC)[6], which is a novel
communication medium for sharing and exchanging opinions in a community.
POC is a kind of broadcasting system for a community that collects messages
from members and feeds edited stories back to them. EgoChat plays mainly a
broadcasting role in POC.

5. Related Work

Technologies for conversational agents that support our thinking process
have been discussed in some works. The SAGE [8] agent helps to generate an
autobiography of a user to enable the user to explore his inner world. Rea [1]

and Imp Characters work with human-like interaction to explain commercial
information to customers. Each agent in these studies works alone and talks
from one point of view. In contrast, EgoChat works with many agents and the
agents talk from various view points of the community members. Therefore,
the user can get many views about a topic on EgoChat.

6. Conclusion

We proposed a new method for supporting community knowledge creation.
We have developed a system called EgoChat, which is a new asynchronous
communication channel for a community that has a casual and conversational
flavor. The virtual chat that the EgoChat system provides is applicable to a
community formed over an asynchronous media, i.e., mailing lists or electronic
bulletin boards. As future work, we are planning to apply EgoChat to a large
community over a network and evaluate its usefulness.

Notes

1. The conversation was originally in Japanese.
2. Japanese distilled liquor made from wheat or rice.
3. Extempo, http://www.extempo.com/

References

[1] J. Cassell, H. Vilhjlmsson, K. Chang, T. Bickmore, L. Campbell, andH. Yan. Requirements
for an architecture for embodied conversational characters. In Computer Animation and
Simulation ’99 (Eurographics Series), 1999.