Collaborative Systems Involving Synthetic Characters and High-risk Adolescents

涉及合成角色和高危青少年的协作系统

• 批准号: 0534211
• 负责人: Robert Hubal
• 金额: $ 38.8万
• 依托单位: Research Triangle Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-06-15 至 2009-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0534211&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Systems; Involving; Synthetic; Characters

This is a project to advance synthetic character technology as a novel platform for assessing adolescents' decision making and social competency skills. Virtual vignettes will present the adolescent with full-body animated, conversant characters with whom the adolescent interacts via natural language and who exhibit emotional, gestural, cognitive, and social intelligence. Because inputs and responses to the synthetic characters are natural, the vignettes assess adolescents' situation-specific behavior rather than test their understanding of how they think they should behave.This research builds on a recently completed study that provided preliminary evidence that virtual vignettes can yield performance measures with construct and criterion validity. It will investigate how to improve the fidelity of the synthetic characters in developing more appropriate language, gesture, cognitive, and social models to drive their behavior. These activities will require novel approaches to linguistic, emotional, gestural, cognitive, and social modeling. In-depth experimental analyses (usability and accessibility studies, acceptance, and performance measuring) will compare adolescents who exhibit conduct disorder with matched normal adolescents using the application, focusing on how the different groups attend differently to virtual stimuli, to determine what causes differences in behavior such as acquiescing in risky behavior. The research will also explore how well the technology might extend towards assessment of behavior of different participant groups. This research addresses the need to empower a traditionally underserved group with new combinations of computer interfaces, including virtual reality, natural language, and emotive synthetic characters. The work will advance the knowledge and understanding of both synthetic character technology and the needs of at-risk children, and particularly how researchers should go about developing collaborative, adaptive systems that address adolescents' needs. Ultimately, tools based on synthetic character technology could assess poor social skills and offer educational experiences within the classroom, clinical settings, and juvenile correctional institutions. In the long term, the techniques may be adapted as early interventional measures for younger children who may have cognitive dysfunctions but who have not yet developed inappropriate behaviors.

这是一个推进合成性格技术作为评估青少年决策和社会能力技能的新平台的项目。 虚拟小插曲将呈现给青少年全身动画，熟悉的人物，青少年通过自然语言与他们互动，并表现出情感，手势，认知和社会智能。由于输入和反应的合成字符是自然的，小插曲评估青少年的具体情况下的行为，而不是测试他们的理解，他们认为他们应该behavior.This研究建立在最近完成的研究，提供了初步证据，虚拟小插曲可以产生性能指标的结构和标准效度。 它将研究如何提高合成角色的保真度，开发更合适的语言，手势，认知和社会模型来驱动他们的行为。这些活动将需要语言，情感，手势，认知和社会建模的新方法。深入的实验分析（可用性和可访问性研究，接受度和性能测量）将比较使用该应用程序的表现出行为障碍的青少年与匹配的正常青少年，重点关注不同群体如何不同地关注虚拟刺激，以确定是什么导致行为差异，例如默许危险行为。 该研究还将探索该技术如何扩展到评估不同参与者群体的行为。这项研究解决了需要赋予传统上服务不足的群体以新的计算机界面组合，包括虚拟现实，自然语言和情感合成角色。这项工作将促进对合成角色技术和高危儿童需求的认识和理解，特别是研究人员应该如何开发满足青少年需求的协作性、适应性系统。最终，基于合成角色技术的工具可以评估不良的社会技能，并在课堂、临床环境和青少年教养机构中提供教育经验。从长远来看，这些技术可能适合作为早期干预措施，用于可能有认知功能障碍但尚未出现不当行为的幼儿。