Enabling Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents
I. Kola (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
C.M. Jonker – Promotor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
M.B. van Riemsdijk – Copromotor (University of Twente)
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Abstract
The use of support agents that help people in their daily lives is steadily growing. While there have been continuous developments in integrating and modelling internal aspects of the user in these support agents, research shows that people's behavior is also shaped by their environment. While there have been attempts at integrating elements of the physical environment such as location, support agents generally lack the ability to take into account the effect of the user's social situation on their behavior. This is important since the majority of our daily life situations have a social nature.
This thesis proposes a social situation awareness framework for allowing support agents to take into account the user's social situation in order to offer more comprehensive support. The framework is inspired by existing work on situation awareness from research in human factors and computer science, instantiated with concepts from social sciences.
This thesis demonstrates how to integrate social situation awareness components in support agents. The studies presented in the thesis provide insight into the concepts and techniques that are needed for social situation awareness, and how they can be used in practice through a hypothetical case study involving a socially aware agenda management agent. This contribution serves as a blueprint for designers of support agents, and provides a basis towards more comprehensive support for users.