HCC: Coordinating Communication: Visual, Social & Biological Factors in Grounding for Humans and Agents

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

With the advent of increasing numbers of increasingly smart machines, there is a growing need to develop technologies that are not only smart, but sensitive to the people and the other machines around them, and sensitive to the context in which they are used. Such an understanding will permit the development of technologies that can coordinate their interactions with humans in a more natural, seamless and fluid fashion. To meet these goals, this research program focuses on three critical yet under-studied contexts of interaction, each of which represents a different constraint upon interpersonal communication: (1) the physical context of shared visual access, (2) the social context of rapport, and (3) the biological context of aging. While some research has been conducted on each of these contextual factors, none has addressed their interaction, nor gathered them into one broader conception of the role of context in interpersonal coordination. This research applies a theory-driven design approach that includes experimental studies, theory development, computational modeling, system implementation and evaluation. In particular, the research program proposes: a) A rigorous study of human-to-human communication using elicitation experiments to develop a more detailed understanding of interpersonal communication across a range of contexts; b) A formalization of the findings into computationally explicit forms that provide predictions of behavior and capture the observed behavioral patterns; c) Integration of the models into a dialogue manager that is implemented within a larger computational architecture; and, d) Evaluation of the implemented system by having untrained humans interact with the system in such a way as to evaluate its effectiveness and reveal gaps in the underlying models as well as in our theoretical understanding. The outcome of this research will advance our theoretical understanding of the role various contextual factors play during interpersonal communication. The results will be useful to a variety of scientific communities including those that study basic human communication (e.g., psychologists, linguists and communication researchers) and those that study interactive computational systems (e.g., computer scientists, computational linguists, and interaction designers). The research will also provide practical design guidelines and a general computational model that describes how machines can make intelligent choices on the basis of these contextual factors during everyday interactions. At a practical level, the general computational model can be applied by technologists developing many different technologies, such as embodied agents, large-scale displays, ubiquitous computing, in-car navigation, and assistive technologies for the elderly and those with cognitive impairments.