Page 78 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 7

COOPERATIVE INTERFACE AGENTS

Sebastiano Pizzutilo, Berardina De Carolis and Fiorella de Rosis
Department of Computer Science, University of Bari

Abstract Animated agents are endowed with personality and emotions, with the aim of
increasing their believability and of establishing an “empathetic” relationship
with the user. In this chapter, we claim that, to endow agents with social intel-
ligence, the communication traits described in the Five Factor Model should be
integrated with some cooperation attitudes. We describe our experience in build-
ing an agent that combines the two personality aspects and discuss the problems
still open.

1. Introduction

In the near future, computers will either “disappear”, to ubiquitously per-
vade life environment in a not immediately perceivable way, or take the ap-
pearance of a human being, to undertake a friendship relationship with the
user. In both cases, endowing agents with some form of social intelligence
appears to be a crucial need. If reasoning, help and control abilities are dis-
tributed among specialised agents integrated with objects of daily life, some
form of communication and cooperation among them will be needed, to avoid
conflicting behaviours. Moreover, a “believable” embodied agent should be
able to understand the users, help them in solving problems, find ways of com-
ing to a mediated solution in case of conflicts and so on. To enable the users to
foresee how the agent will behave, it should harmonise its external appearance
with its internal behaviour, understand how to adapt to their needs and moods
and, finally, enable them to “select a different partner” if they wish.
Short and long-term variations in the behaviour of embodied agents have
been metaphorically represented, respectively, in terms of emotional states and
personality traits. Endowing socially intelligent agents with a personality re-