Page 32 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots 15

write and tell stories and to create ‘emotions’ that the robot can act out. Using
Storykit children can create their own StoryRooms that provide story-telling
experience. Tests of PETS and StoryKit were promising and let to a list of de-
sign guidelines that for building attractive and interactive story environments
for children.
2.7 Socially Intelligent Agents in Games and
Entertainment

This section concerns important mainstream applications of the technology
of socially intelligent agents, in educational games, in interactive drama, and
in interactive art. In educational games, agents must exhibit enough social so-
phistication so as to be able to flexibly manage students’ emotional states and
learning engagement. In a drama of purely autonomous agents, each agent
would need to be equipped with sufficient intelligence to react reasonably to
the range of situations that can occur; those that can be generated by the to-
tal system. This intelligence presumably is represented in the form of social
knowledge, abilities for perceiving and understanding other’s behaviors, the
ability to identify and characterize problems, and the ability to generate and
execute plans for solving these goals. In order to make this enormous problem
tractable, we can limit the range of possibilities to certain classes of behaviors,
social interactions and goals. Although the agents stay within a given class of
behaviors, an observing human will perceive an extended range of intentions.
When we then try to involve a human in an agent drama, we have to provide
for agents perceiving the actions of the human. More importantly, the human
will not be able to stay within a prespecified class of behaviors. Thus, agents
will need to respond to a wider range of actions and situations. This presents
a major challenge for agent designers. Further, we will usually want more
of the ensuing action than the human just spending time in the virtual social
world. We want to arrange for the human to take part in a drama with certain
dramatic goals which express the author’s intent. Thus, in interactive drama
we hit core issues of the development of characters which can dynamically re-
spond to novel situations in ways which are not only socially appropriate but
which further dramaturgic goals. In interactive art, we descend into the self of
the human interactor.
In chapter 26, Cristina Conati and Maria Klawe explain how the flexibility
and social appropriateness achievable with socially intelligent agents can ef-
fectively support the learning process of students. They describe their system
for multiplayer multiactivity educational games. The main issues concern how
socially intelligent agents can model the players’ cognitive and metacognitive
skills, i.e. including their management of their own cognitive activity, as well
as motivational states and engagement in a collaborative interaction.