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December 7, 2005
She loves me. She loves me not.
Affective computing systems can read users' emotional states and adjust their operations to accommodate those states. One example is Laura, an "emotionally intelligent" virtual fitness trainer that encourages users to stick with an exercise program via a combination of friendly gestures and dialogue, empathetic facial expressions, and a soft, soothing voice.
Her developer, former MIT graduate student Timothy Bickmore, explains that Laura's personality is programmed within an augmented transition network, which he describes as "a series of decision trees that represent different fragments of the conversation." The software assesses a user's answers to Laura's questions to determine the best response; analyzes the factual content of what the trainer will say and chooses expressions, hand gestures, vocal tones, and other emotional cues in which to render the response; studies the content of what it is about to say, compares it to previous dialogue, and then ascertains which elements of the dialogue contain new data; and physically emphasizes the speech fragments with new information.
However, users must enter their dialogue through a keyboard instead of a voice interface, while another challenge Laura's developers are working on is the development of software that can read emotional signals indicating when intercession is--and is not--the best course of action. Among the critics of affective computing is virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who warns that investing computers with the guise of empathy could consequently make users "emotionally stupid." [1]
[1] Spotted by ACM TechNews - Wednesday, December 7, 2005. http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2005-7/1207w.html. The source article is Bennett Daviss, Tell Laura I Love Her, New Scientist (12/03/05) Vol. 188, No. 2528, P. 42; available on-line to individual or institutional subscribers. UVM readers should go to Library website and browse through the electronic journals section for "New Scientist."
Laura's home site is http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/relational/.
Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions, thus Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectations in their interactions with users.
Since face-to-face conversation is the primary context of relationship building for humans, this work focuses on relational agents as a specialized kind of embodied conversational agent, which are animated humanoid software agents that use speech, gaze, gesture, intonation and other nonverbal modalities to emulate the experience of human face-to-face conversation.
Available at that site is a self extracting (.exe) file containing a movie of an interaction with Laura.
Posted by sjc at December 7, 2005 4:06 PM
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