CAREER: A Virtual Laboratory for Studying Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

As computers interact with people in increasingly complex and human ways through robots, wearable devices, PDAs, and various other ubiquitous interfaces, the psychological aspects of our relationships with them take on an increasingly important role. It is important to not only understand the nature of this phenomenon and its effects in work and leisure contexts, but also to develop strategies for building and managing these relationships, which directly impact productivity, enjoyment, engagement and other important outcomes of human-computer interaction. In this research, the PI intends to explore such issues via relational agents, computational artifacts designed to build long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users by managing expectations, attitudes and intentions. While such agents can take on a number of embodiments (e.g., as jewelry, clothing, handheld, robotic, and various non-humanoid physical or nonphysical forms), the current project will focus on the development of purely software humanoid animated agents. Building on his prior work, the PI will develop a "virtual laboratory" consisting of a networked software architecture and experimental methodology to support very long-term human-computer interaction studies, in which new experiments and agent capabilities can be dynamically integrated into a running system serving a persistent group of human subjects. The virtual laboratory will then be used as a means to studying how social interface agents can conduct very long-term interactions with users - spanning months or years of daily use - and the impacts these interactions can have on user education, behavior change and overall well-being. While social interface agents have broad applicability, this project will target one application domain (physical activity promotion) and one user group (urban older adults) in order to focus and ground the research. Special care will be paid to imparting to the agents the ability to interact naturally with users and to form social-emotional relationships with them over time, in order to promote their effectiveness in both maintaining long-term interaction and achieving positive task outcomes. In addition to advancing knowledge relating to human-computer interaction, this research will make significant contributions to the fields of computational linguistics, psychology, and communication. In the field of computational linguistics, the work will advance our knowledge of how to build dialog planners that can produce both task-oriented and social dialogue - including both verbal and nonverbal conversational behavior - intended to build and maintain social relationships with users within specifically targeted task domains; it will also address how to model and reason about human-machine dialog that spans multiple interactions. In psychology and communication, this work will provide a better understanding of the nature and types of social relationships that people can have with computer agents, techniques that agents can use to build and maintain these relationships, and how human-computer relationships can improve certain kinds of task performance. Broader Impacts: The outcomes of this effort will include new ways of modeling human relationships and social and relational behavior. The project will also lead to an understanding of how people and computer agents can optimally live and work together over extended periods of time, which in turn may improve our understanding of human-human relationships by providing new vocabulary, models and paradigms for thinking about relationships. Finally, this work will target an underserved population (older adults) while focusing on an application domain (healthy lifestyle promotion) that has the potential for significant positive impacts on our overall society.