Situational Deliberation: Getting to Social Intelligence

Socially intelligent systems exhibit, understand, and reason about social behavior, in order to support people in their daily lives. We claim that a fundamental new approach based on social concepts is needed to build these socially intelligent systems. In this paper, we explore how the concepts of social practices and social identities can be...

User Validation of an Empathic Virtual Buddy against Cyberbullying

People are able to comfort others by talking about their problems. In our research, we are exploring whether computers can provide social support in a similar manner. Recently, we proposed a design for an empathic virtual buddy that supports victims of cyberbullying. To validate our approach in providing social support and to gather feedback...

A Conversation Model Enabling Intelligent Agents to Give Emotional Support

In everyday life, people frequently talk to others to help them deal with negative emotions. To some extent, everybody is capable of comforting other people, but so far conversational agents are unable to deal with this type of situation. To provide intelligent agents with the capability to give emotional support, we propose a domain-independent...

A Conversational Agent for Social Support: Validation of Supportive Dialogue Sequences

Recently, we proposed a dialogue model for social support. To validate this model, we analyzed 23 real world chat conversations. After some adjustments, the dialogue sequence patterns specified in the model cover 87.4% of the data. Based on this result, we conclude that the dialogue model accurately describes comforting conversations. Next, the...

Corpus-based Validation of a Dialogue Model for Social Support

Recent developments in affective computing show that Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are increasingly capable of complex social and emotional dialogues. Our research concerns the design and evaluation of an ECA that provides social support to children that are being bullied though the Internet. Recently, we proposed a domain-independent...

A BDI Dialogue Agent for Social Support: Specification and Evaluation Method (extended abstract)

An important task for empathic agents is to provide social support, that is, to help alleviate emotional distress. In this paper we specify verbal support types for a dialogue agent that provides social support, and propose an evaluation method for such an agent in a sensitive domain (cyberbullying) with a vulnerable target audience (children).

A BDI Dialogue Agent for Social Support: Specification and Evaluation Method

An important task for empathic agents is to provide social support, that is, to help people increase their well-being and decrease the perceived burden of their problems. The contributions of this paper are 1) the specifcation of speech acts for a social support dialogue agent, and 2) an evaluation method for this agent. The dialogue agent...

A novel gesture-based interface for crime scene investigation in mediated reality

This paper introduces a novel gesture-based interface for crime scene investigation. The interface is part of a mediated reality system in which remote collaboration is supported. Requirements elicited from interviews and interactive sessions showed that our gesture-based user interface is effective in operating a 3D interface and allows the...

Agreeing on role adoption in open organisations

The organisational specification of a multi-agent system supports agents’ effectiveness in attaining their purpose, or prevent certain undesired behaviour from occurring. This requires that agents are able to find out about the organisational purpose and description and decide on its appropriateness for their own objectives. Organisational...

Simulating Peer Support for Victims of Cyberbullying

This paper proposes a design for an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that empowers victims of cyberbullying by simulating peer support. The anti-cyberbullying buddy helps a child to cope with negative emotions due to a cyberbullying incident and it shows the child how to deal with future incidents of cyberbullying. The buddy interacts with...

Modernization of electricity networks: Exploring the interrelations between institutions and technology

Turbulent dispersion in cloud-topped boundary layers

Compared to dry boundary layers, dispersion in cloud-topped boundary layers has received less attention. In this LES based numerical study we investigate the dispersion of a passive tracer in the form of Lagrangian particles for four kinds of atmospheric boundary layers: 1) a dry convective boundary layer (for reference), 2) a "smoke" cloud...