Alle Publikationen
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2019
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(2019) : Towards Virtual Agents for Supporting Appropriate Small Group Behaviors in Educational Contexts: 2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games): 2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games): Hangzhou, China: IEEE, S. 1-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VS-Games.2019.8864528 Abstract: Verbal and non-verbal behaviors that we use in order to effectively communicate with other people are vital for our success in our daily lives. Despite the importance of social skills, creating standardized methods for training them and supporting their training is challenging. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) may have a good potential to support social and emotional learning (SEL) through virtual social demonstration games. This paper presents initial work involving the design of a pedagogical scenario to facilitate teaching of socially appropriate and inappropriate behaviors when entering and standing in a small group of people, a common occurrence in collaborative social situations. This is achieved through the use of virtual characters and, initially, virtual reality (VR) environments for supporting situated learning in multiple contexts. We describe work done thus far on the demonstrator scenario and anticipated potentials, pitfalls and challenges involved in the approach.
Keywords: Collaboration, collaborative social situations, computer aided instruction, Demonstration Games, educational contexts, emotional & politeness, Games, ieee xplore, Information and communication technology, information and communications technology, nonverbal behaviors, Politeness, serious games (computing), small group behaviors, Small Groups, Social & Emotional Learning, social and emotional learning, Social robotic, Software agents, Task Analysis, Teaching, Training, Verbal Behavior, virtual agents, Virtual characters, Virtual reality, virtual social demonstration games 2017
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(2017): Culture-specific models of negotiation for virtual characters. Multi-attribute decision-making based on culture-specific values. In: AI & Society 32 (1), S. 51-63. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-014-0570-7
Abstract: We posit that observed differences in negotiation performance across cultures can be explained by participants trying to optimize across multiple values, where the relative importance of values differs across cultures. We look at two ways for specifying weights on values for different cultures: one in which the weights of the model are hand-crafted, based on intuition interpreting Hofstede dimensions for the cultures, and one in which the weights of the model are learned from data using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). We apply this model to the Ultimatum Game and integrate it into a virtual human dialog system. We show that weights learned from IRL surpass both a weak baseline with random weights and a strong baseline considering only one factor for maximizing gain in own wealth in accounting for the behavior of human players from four different cultures. We also show that the weights learned with our model for one culture outperform weights learned for other cultures when playing against opponents of the first culture.
Keywords: Cultural decision-making, culture specific, Disziplin, entscheiden, Inverse reinforcement learning: Hofstede, Kulturtheorie, Mensch-Technik-Relationen (MTR), NEGOTIATION, Realtechnik, Science and Technology Studies (STS), social importance dynamics, Sozial Intelligente Agenten, Soziale Robotik, Spieltheorie, Technik, Ultimatum Game, virtual agents 2015
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(2015): Modeling culture in intelligent virtual agents. In: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 30 (5), S. 931-962. DOI: 10.1007/s10458-015-9312-6
Abstract: This work addresses the challenge of creating virtual agents that are able to portray culturally appropriate behavior when interacting with other agents or humans. Because culture influences how people perceive their social reality it is important to have agent models that explicitly consider social elements, such as existing relational factors. We addressed this necessity by integrating culture into a novel model for simulating human social behavior. With this model, we operationalized a particular dimension of culture—individualism versus collectivism—within the context of an interactive narrative scenario that is part of an agent-based tool for intercultural training. Using this scenario we conducted a cross-cultural study in which participants from a collectivistic country (Portugal) were compared with participants from an individualistic country (the Netherlands) in the way they perceived and interacted with agents whose behavior was either individualistic or collectivistic, according to the configuration of the proposed model. In the obtained results, Portuguese subjects rated the collectivistic agents more positively than the Dutch but both countries had a similarly positive opinion about the individualistic agents. This experiment sheds new light on how people from different countries differ when assessing the social appropriateness of virtual agents, while also raising new research questions on this matter.
Keywords: Agent-based Modelling, cross-cultural, culturally appropriate behavior, Culture, Disziplin, Favoriten, individual vs collective, individuell, intercultural training, kollektiv, Kultur, Kulturspezifizität, Kulturtheorie, Modelle/Theorien, Modellierung, simulation, social appropriateness, social importance dynamics, virtual agents 2012
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(2012): Natural interaction with culturally adaptive virtual characters. In: Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 6 (1-2), S. 39-47. DOI: 10.1007/s12193-011-0087-z
Abstract: Recently, the verbal and non-verbal behavior of virtual characters has become more and more sophisticated due to advances in behavior planning and rendering. Nevertheless, the appearance and behavior of these characters is in most cases based on the cultural background of their designers. Especially in combination with new natural interaction interfaces, there is the risk that characters developed for a particular culture might not find acceptance when being presented to another culture. A few attempts have been made to create characters that reflect a particular cultural background. However, interaction with these characters still remains an awkward experience in particular when it comes to non-verbal interaction. In many cases, human users either have to choose actions from a menu their avatar has to execute or they have to struggle with obtrusive interaction devices. In contrast, our paper combines an approach to the generation of culture-specific behaviors with full body avatar control based on the Kinect sensor. A first study revealed that users are able to easily control an avatar through their body movements and immediately adapt its behavior to the cultural background of the agents they interact with.
2011
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(2011): Planning Small Talk behavior with cultural influences for multiagent systems. In: Computer Speech & Language 25 (2), S. 158-174. DOI: 10.1016/j.csl.2010.04.001
Abstract: There are several factors that influence communicative behavior, such as gender, personality or culture. As virtual agents interact in a more and more human-like manner, their behavior should be dependent on social factors as well. Culture is a phenomenon that affects one's behavior without one realizing it. Behavior is thus sometimes perceived as inappropriate because there is no awareness of the cultural gap. Thus, we think cultural background should also influence the communication behavior of virtual agents. Behavioral differences are sometimes easy to recognize by humans but still hard to describe formally, to enable integration into a system that automatically generates culture-specific behavior. In our work, we focus on culture-related differences in the domain of casual Small Talk. Our model of culture-related differences in Small Talk behavior is based on findings described in the literature as well as on a video corpus that was recorded in Germany and Japan. In a validation study, we provide initial evidence that our simulation of culture-specific Small Talk with virtual agents is perceived differently by human observers. We thus implemented a system that automatically generates culture-specific Small Talk dialogs for virtual agents. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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