In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 80 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practises in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social agent (ASA). The effort is driven by previous IVA workshops and plenary IVA discussions related to the methodological crisis on the evaluation of ASAs. A previous literature review showed a continuous practise of creating new questionnaires instead of reusing validated questionnaires. We address this issue by examining questionnaire measurement constructs used in empirical studies between 2013 to 2018 published in the IVA conference. We identified 189 constructs used in 89 questionnaires that are reported across 81 studies. Although these constructs have different names, they often measure the same thing. In this paper, we, therefore, present a unifying set of 19 constructs that captures more than 80% of the 189 constructs initially identified. We established this set in two steps. First, 49 researchers classified the constructs in broad theoretically based categories. Next, 23 researchers grouped the constructs in each category on their similarity. The resulting 19 groups form a unifying set of constructs, which will be the basis for the future questionnaire instrument of human-ASA interaction.

Research into artificial social agents aims at constructing these agents and at establishing an empirically grounded understanding of them, their interaction with humans, and howthey can ultimately deliver certain outcomes in areas such as health, entertainment, and education. Key for establishing such understanding is the community's ability to describe and replicate their observations on how users perceive and interact with their agents. In this paper, we address this ability by examining questionnaires and their constructs used in empirical studies reported in the intelligent virtual agent conference proceedings from 2013 to 2018. The literature survey shows the identification of 189 constructs used in 89 questionnaires thatwere reported across 81 papers.We found unexpectedly little repeated use of questionnaires as the vast majority of questionnaires (more than 76%) were only reported in a single paper. We expect that this finding will motivate joint effort by the IVA community towards creating a unified measurement instrument.

Research into artificial social agents aims at constructing these agents and at establishing an empirically grounded understanding of them, their interaction with humans, and how they can ultimately deliver certain outcomes in areas such as health, entertainment, and education. Key for establishing such understanding is the community’s ability to describe and replicate their observations on how users perceive and interact with their agents. In this paper, we address this ability by examining questionnaires and their constructs used in empirical studies reported in the intelligent virtual agent conference proceedings from 2013 to 2018. The literature survey shows the identification of 189 constructs used in 89 questionnaires that were reported across 81 papers. We found unexpectedly little repeated use of questionnaires as the vast majority of questionnaires (more than 76%) were only reported in a single paper. We expect that this finding will motivate joint effort by the IVA community towards creating a unified measurement instrument and in the broader AI community a renewed interest in replicability of our (user) studies.

Chatty Factories is a three-year investment by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through its programme for New Industrial Systems. The project explores the transformative potential of placing IoT-enabled data driven systems at the core of design and manufacturing processes. The research focuses on the opportunity to collect data from IoT-enabled sensors embedded in products during real-time use by consumers, explores how that data might be immediately transferred into usable information to inform design, and considers what characteristics of the manufacturing environment might optimise the response to such data. The project also considers implications arising for skills development in the education sector as well as ethics in manufacturing. In this paper we provide a vision for future “Chatty Factories”.