Page 159 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

142 Socially Intelligent Agents

Develop possible solutions, Evaluate your options, Act on your plan and See if
it worked).
In an interactive pedagogical drama, a learner (human user) interacts with
believable characters in a believable story that the learner empathizes with. In
particular, the characters may be facing and resolving overwhelming, emotion-
ally charged difficulties similar to the learner’s. The learner’s identification
with the characters and the believability of their problems are central to the
goals of having the learner fully interact with the drama, accept the efficacy of
the skills being employed in it and subsequently apply those skills in her own
life.
The design of IPDs poses many challenges. The improvisational agents
who answer the casting call for characters like Carmen and Gina must provide
convincing portrayals of humans facing difficult personal and social problems.
They must have ways of modeling goals, personality and emotion, as well as
ways of portraying those models via communicative and evocative gestures.
Most critically, an IPD is a social drama. Thus, the agents in the drama
must behave like socially interacting humans. An agent has to be concerned
with how other agents view their behavior. They may emotionally react if
they believe others view them in an way that is inconsistent with how they see
themselves (their ego identity). Also, to achieve its goals, an agent may need
to motivate, or manipulate, another agent to act (or not to act).
Due to the highly emotional, stressful events being dramatized, the design
of the agent models was a key concern. The design was heavily inspired by
emotional and personality models coming out of work on human stress and
coping (Lazarus 1991), in contrast to the more commonly used models in agent
design coming out of a cognitive or linguistic view (e.g., [6], [10], [11]).
IPDs are animated dramas and therefore their design raises a wide range
of presentational issues and draws on a range of research to address those
issues that can only be briefly touched upon here (see [8] for additional de-
tails). The agent architecture uses a model of gesture heavily influenced not
only by work on communicative use of gesture ([3], [9]) but also work on
non-communicative but emotionally revealing nonverbal behavior [4], includ-
ing work coming out of clinical studies [5]. Further, since these agents are
acting out in a drama, there must be ways to dynamically manage the drama’s
structure and impact even while the characters in it are self-motivated, impro-
visational agents (e.g., [7], [2]). Because IPDs are animated and dynamically
unfold, there must be ways of managing their presentation (e.g., [1], [12]).
The discussion that follows provides a brief overview of the IPD design.
The relation of the agents’ emotional modeling to their social interactions is
then discussed in greater detail using examples drawn from Carmen’s Bright
IDEAS.