A lack of self-awareness of communicative behaviours can lead to disadvantages in important interactions. Video recordings as a tool for self-observation have been widely adopted to initiate behaviour change and reflection. Seeing oneself in a recording can lead to negative affect. Forcing an external perspective can lead to cognitive dissonance. Avatars and virtual agents have the advantage that they can copy a human's behaviour while potentially avoiding this dissonance. To explore the design space of mimicking agents, we set up a user study where a video baseline is compared to agent-mediated conditions ranging from idle non-verbal behaviour to complete mimicry of the voice and face. We show that participants gain increased self-awareness from seeing themselves mediated through the virtual agent. We further discuss qualitative observations for the future design of systems that aid in self-reflection, and particularly note that partial mimicry seems to be less appreciated than full mimicry.

Negotiation is not a skill that comes naturally to most people. However, most people could benefit from attaining good negotiation skills. Non-verbal behaviour plays an important role in negotiations. Previous studies have shown a link between mimicry through conversational agents and self-regulation of non-verbal behaviour. The current study aims to raise a person’s self-awareness of their non-verbal behaviour through the medium of a conversational agent in negotiation training. An experiment (N = 64) is conducted where participants performed negotiations with an intermediate feedback round where the participants' non-verbal behaviour was played back on a virtual agent. The agent either mimicked the participants’ non-verbal behaviour or exhibited idle behaviour. It was found that the mimicking agent provided better feedback to the participants. Furthermore, repeated negotiations increase a person's self-awareness. The data indicate that raising a person’s self-awareness in negotiation training by utilising non-verbal mimicry through a conversational agent is feasible.

Being a company with over 1500 employees, a lot of data is available about people and their day-to-day pursuits, including projects they are working on. Company X has requested to gain more insight into this data, as it is currently scattered over multiple systems. Specifically, they requested to gain insight into which projects have been started around a certain topic, who is involved in these projects, what the status on these projects is and where these projects are carried out inside the company. Company X wants this data represented in a dynamic, scalable and interactive visualisation. To create a product that fulfils the expectations and needs of Company X, a Proof of Concept (PoC) was created. This basic version was used to make sure that Company X and the development team had the same basic idea of the application to be created and was then extended to an Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Having completed this MVP, additional features were implemented. Such features include making the solution generic for different data sources, the ability to filter and search through the data and highlighting/focusing specific data types. In order to ensure that the visualisation can be used instinctively and deliver the information it is meant to, a user study was set up. In this user study, multiple employees of Company X tested the visualisation by completing a set of tasks within the application. By tracking the different results (i.e. number of clicks, time, subjective opinions), the team was able to derive that the application is quite promising, but still had the need for some improvements to explore its full potential.