HCC: Small: Designing Effective Gaze Mechanisms for Cross-Modal Embodied Agents

该项目的目标是设计和构建凝视机制体现代理，可以实现高层次的社会和沟通的目标，人们实现使用这种机制，并可以应用于广泛的代理演示和任务domains. Twoed代理承诺显着的社会，认知和组织效益，通过在教育，培训，康复和协作工作中的应用。然而，为了在广泛的应用中有效，代理必须能够使用人类在其通信中使用的非语言社交线索，并以代理呈现的任何形式使用这些线索-无论是社交机器人，真人大小的虚拟人还是便携式显示器上的动画化身。凝视线索是特别重要的社交信号。虽然它们是微妙的，但它们可以作为实现高层次社交和沟通目标的强大机制，例如改善听众？它能帮助人们理解事物，控制谈话的进程，并表示对事物的兴趣或评价。本研究旨在探讨如何为具身主体设计和建立这种机制，以及如何在不同的任务领域使用不同的主体表征来实现类似的社会和交际目标。本研究将涉及（1）进行正式的观察研究，以更好地了解人们如何使用凝视，（2）开发综合凝视行为的计算模型，这些凝视行为可以被精确控制并重新定向到一系列代理平台，以及（3）在实验研究中评估在一系列代理呈现和任务上下文中使用凝视线索的有效性。该项目的成功将创造关于人类凝视行为的新知识，将社会科学文献中的高层次发现与更详细的低层次线索和机制联系起来。它还将产生一套基于这种理解的技术，用于合成可控制和灵活的凝视运动，代理可以使用这些运动来实现社会和沟通目标。跨学科的方法将联合收割机结合严格的、正式的观察研究来建立人类交流机制的详细模型，并通过实际的努力来建立可用的计算模型，以满足创建在现实世界任务中工作的智能体的需求。对人类模型的关注确保了计算模型是有根据的，而对开发实用算法的关注则指导了人类研究，以创建对代理设计最有用的理解。该项目计划涉及连接不同的社区，这些社区致力于开发社会代理人，并培训学生进行创建有效的具体代理人所需的跨学科工作。该项目还将使K-12外展工作能够使用机器人和与社会科学的联系来吸引学生，并增加代表性不足的群体的参与。

The goal of this project is to design and build gaze mechanisms for embodied agents that can achieve high-level social and communicative goals that people achieve using such mechanisms and that can be applied across a wide range of agent presentations and task domains.Embodied agents promise significant social, cognitive, and organizational benefits through applications in education, training, rehabilitation, and collaborative work. However, in order to be effective across a wide range of applications, agents must be able to use the nonverbal social cues that humans employ in their communication and to employ these cues in whatever modality the agent is presented in - whether it be a social robot, a life-sized virtual human, or an animated avatar on a portable display. Gaze cues are particularly important social signals. Although they are subtle, they can serve as powerful mechanisms for achieving high-level social and communicative goals, such as improving a listener?s comprehension, controlling the flow of a conversation, and indicating interest in or appraisal of objects. This project investigates how such mechanisms might be designed and built for embodied agents and how similar social and communicative goals could be achieved using different agent representations across different task domains.This investigation will involve (1) performing formal observational studies to better understand how people use gaze, (2) developing computational models that synthesize gaze behaviors that can be controlled precisely and retargeted to a range of agent platforms, and (3) evaluating in experimental studies the effectiveness of using gaze cues across a range of agent presentations and task contexts. Success in this project will create new knowledge on human gaze behaviors, connecting the high-level findings in the social science literature to more detailed, low-level cues and mechanisms. It will also produce a set of techniques that are based on this understanding for synthesizing controllable and flexible gaze movements that agents can use in order to achieve social and communicative goals. Finally, it will validate the effectiveness of the use of gaze cues by agents across a variety of agent presentations and task contexts.A trans-disciplinary approach will combine rigorous, formal observational studies to build detailed models of human communicative mechanisms with practical efforts to build usable computational models that meet the needs of creating agents that work in real-world tasks. The focus on human models insures that the computational models are well founded, while the focus on developing practical algorithms guides the human studies towards creating understanding that will be most informative for agent design. The project plan involves connecting the disparate communities that work on developing social agents and training students to do the trans-disciplinary work required to create effective embodied agents. The project will also enable K-12 outreach efforts to use robots and connections to social science to engage students and increase participation by under-represented groups.