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Party Hosts and Tour Guides 51

4. Conclusions

In both agent projects, use of nonverbal social cues added value to human-
human interaction. Of course, more exploration and evaluation is needed.
I encourage those in the social interface agent community to design agents
for support roles such as tour guide or host, leaving the humans center stage.
Design for group situations refocuses one’s efforts to track and adapt to users,
and creates an interesting new set of challenges. It also adds to the potentially
useful applications for everyone’s work in this field.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted at NTT’s Open Laboratory in Japan. Helper Agent was created
with Hideyuki Nakanishi and Toru Ishida, of Kyoto University, and many other graduate and
undergraduate students there. The study of Helper Agent was supported by Clifford Nass at
Stanford University, as well as by Kyoto University. Tour Guide Agent was created with the
engineering team at the NTT Open Lab, as well as students from Stanford University, resident
at the Stanford Japan Center. Thanks to all for making this work possible.
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