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

随着计算机通过机器人、可穿戴设备、PDA和其他各种无处不在的界面以越来越复杂和人性化的方式与人互动，我们与它们的关系的心理方面发挥着越来越重要的作用。 重要的是不仅要了解这一现象的性质及其在工作和休闲环境中的影响，而且要制定建立和管理这些关系的战略，这些关系直接影响生产力，享受，参与和人机交互的其他重要成果。 在这项研究中，PI打算通过关系代理来探索这些问题，这些关系代理是通过管理期望、态度和意图来与用户建立长期的社会情感关系的计算工件。 虽然这样的试剂可以采用许多实施例（例如，如珠宝、服装、手持设备、机器人和各种非人形的物理或非物理形式），目前的项目将集中于开发纯软件的人形动画代理。 在他之前工作的基础上，PI将开发一个由网络软件架构和实验方法组成的“虚拟实验室”，以支持非常长期的人机交互研究，其中新的实验和代理功能可以动态地集成到一个运行系统中，为一组持久的人类受试者提供服务。 然后，虚拟实验室将被用作研究社交界面代理如何与用户进行长期互动的手段-跨越数月或数年的日常使用-以及这些互动对用户教育，行为变化和整体福祉的影响。 虽然社会界面代理具有广泛的适用性，本项目将针对一个应用领域（体育活动推广）和一个用户群（城市老年人），以集中和地面的研究。 将特别注意赋予代理人与用户自然互动的能力，并随着时间的推移与他们形成社会情感关系，以促进他们在保持长期互动和实现积极任务成果方面的有效性。 除了推进与人机交互相关的知识，这项研究将对计算语言学，心理学和通信领域做出重大贡献。在计算语言学领域，这项工作将推进我们对如何构建对话规划器的知识，这些对话规划器可以产生任务导向和社交对话-包括语言和非语言对话行为-旨在建立和维护与特定目标任务领域内的用户的社交关系;它还将解决如何对跨越多种交互的人机对话进行建模和推理。 在心理学和交流学方面，这项工作将使人们更好地理解人们与计算机代理之间的社会关系的性质和类型，代理可以用来建立和维护这些关系的技术，以及人机关系如何改善某些类型的任务性能。这一努力的成果将包括建立人际关系以及社会和关系行为模型的新方法。 该项目还将有助于理解人和计算机代理如何在很长一段时间内最佳地生活和工作在一起，这反过来又可以通过提供新的词汇，模型和范式来思考关系，从而提高我们对人与人之间关系的理解。 最后，这项工作将针对得不到充分服务的人口（老年人），同时侧重于对我们整个社会有可能产生重大积极影响的应用领域（促进健康生活方式）。

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.