Evaluation of University Research

... Berardina De Carolis, Irene Mazzotta, and Nicole Novielli ... persistent goal Maintance beliefs supporting goals keep the well-ness of the user (P-GOAL N (BEL N (Feel(U,comfort)))) (P-GOAL N (BEL N (Has(U,normal(health_state)))) (P-GOAL N (BEL N NOT(Is(U,Negative ...

ABSTRACT As far as interaction is concerned Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research emphasizes the need of natural and friendly interfaces for accessing services provided by the environment. In this paper we present the result of an experimental study aiming at ...

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are commonly accepted as a new metaphor of Human Computer Interaction in several application domains. They are also used with the roles of influence and behavior change. We present an empirical evaluation study to compare the motivational impact of a persuasive message when conveyed by Valentina (a female young character [1]) and when presented through a text. The believability of our agent has been successfully evaluated in our previous research.

Intelligent access to information could benefit of an effective and natural interaction metaphor. In this perspective, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) can be seen as a promising approach to give to the user the illusion of cooperating with a partner rather than just using a tool. Embedding the HCI technology with human preferences and behavior justifies the attempt of implementing emotional and social intelligence aimed at exceeding the single ability to help the user. In this paper we present an ECA’s architecture and methods useful to interpret the user attitude during her dialog with an ECA and behaving ’believably’ in its turn. In particular, we present an agent architecture that is general enough to be applied in several application domains and that employs several ECA’s bodies according to the context requirements.

In this paper, we investigate the user's reactions to received suggestion by an Embodied Conversational Agent playing the role of artificial therapist in the healthy eating domain. Specifically, we analyse the behaviour of people who voluntarily requested to receive information from the agent, and we compare it with the results of a previous evaluation experiment in which subjects were not properly motivated to interact with the agent because they were selected for evaluating the system. This study is part of an ongoing research aimed at developing an intelligent virtual agent that applies natural argumentation techniques to persuade the users to improve their eating habits.