Acquiring Semantic Knowledge for User Model Updates via Human-Agent Alignment Dialogues

For personal assistive technologies to effectively support users, they need a user model that records information about the user, such as their goals, values, and context. Knowledge-based techniques can model the relationships between these concepts, enabling the support agent to act in accordance with the user's values. However, user models...

Misalignment in Semantic User Model Elicitation via Conversational Agents: A Case Study in Navigation Support for Visually Impaired People

Disabled people can benefit greatly from assistive digital technologies. However, this increased human-machine symbiosis makes it important that systems are personalized and transparent to users. Existing work often uses data-oriented approaches. However, these approaches lack transparency and make it hard to influence the system’s behavior. In...

Toward Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user's social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing...

Predicting the Priority of Social Situations for Personal Assistant Agents

Personal assistant agents have been developed to help people in their daily lives with tasks such as agenda management. In order to provide better support, they should not only model the user’s internal aspects, but also their social situation. Current research on social context tackles this by modelling the social aspects of a situation from...

Grouping Situations Based on their Psychological Characteristics Gives Insight into Personal Values

Support agents are investigated more and more as a way of assisting people in carrying out daily tasks. Support agents should be flexible in adapting their support to what their user needs. Research suggests that the situation someone is in affects their behaviour, however its effect has not been incorporated in the decision making of support...

A Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intellect With Collaborative, Adaptive, Responsible, and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

We define hybrid intelligence (HI) as the combination of human and machine intelligence, augmenting human intellect and capabilities instead of replacing them and achieving goals that were unreachable by either humans or machines. HI is an important new research focus for artificial intelligence, and we set a research agenda for HI by...

Who’s that? - Social situation awareness for behaviour support agents: A feasibility study

Behaviour support agents need to be aware of the social environment of the user in order to be able to provide comprehensive support. However, this is a feature that is currently lacking in existing systems. To tackle it, first of all we explore literature from social sciences in order to find which elements of the social environment need to...

A Formal Graphical Language of Interdependence in Teamwork

Agents in teamwork may be highly interdependent on each other, the awareness of interdependence relationships is an important requirement for designing and consequently implementing a multi-agent system. In this work, we propose a formal graphical and domain-independent language that can facilitate the identification of comprehensive...

Deriving norms from actions, values, and context

Personal technology such as electronic partners (e-partners) play an increasing role in our daily lives, and can make an important difference by supporting us in various ways. However, when they offer this support, it is important that they do so with an understanding of our choices and what is important to us. To allow an e-partner to...

A Temporal Logic for Modelling Activities of Daily Living

Behaviour support technology is aimed at assisting people in organizing their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Numerous frameworks have been developed for activity recognition and for generating specific types of support actions, such as reminders. The main goal of our research is to develop a generic formal framework for representing and...

What should I do?: Deriving norms from actions,values and context

Modelling the Social Environment: Towards Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners

Automated multi-level governance compliance checking

An institution typically comprises constitutive rules, which give shape and meaning to social interactions and regulative rules, which prescribe agent behaviour in the society. Regulative rules guide social interaction, in particular when they are coupled with reward and punishment regulations that are enforced for (non-)compliance. Institution...