Papers about Human's perception of Agent

Virtual communities such as Second Life and Entropia Universe are quickly becoming the next frontier of cybercrime. With GDPs of virtual economies of persistent worlds approaching billions of dollars it is necessary to develop tools for protection of virtual environments similar to those utilized to secure real world’s infrastructure, such as biometrics security systems. The first step in the development of such security methodologies is wide availability of datasets necessary for training and... Read more

When developing cognitive agents capable of interacting with humans, it is often challenging to provide a suitable environment in which agent and user are really co-situated. This paper presents a straightforward approach to use Second Life as a persistent, \near natural\, and socially rich environment for research on autonomous agents in complex surroundings, learning social skills, and how they are perceived by humans. We describe an integration of our conversational agent Max, and his underlying cognitive architecture,... Read more

Intelligent agents, a vast family of computer applications, automates a number of performed tasks ranging from simple macros in Excel or Word, to the complex systems of artificial intelligence capable of learning during the operation, detect problems and to formulate adequate solutions to it. Electronic agents are software programs performing specific tasks and having the necessary knowledge to executing them. They constitute autonomous and intelligent tools, they can interact with their environment and communicate with other... Read more

We performed an empirical study exploring people’s interactions with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) while performing two tasks. Conditions varied with respect to 1) whether participants were allowed to choose an agent and its characteristics and 2) the putative quality or appropriateness of the agent for the tasks. For both tasks, selection combined with the illusion of further customization significantly improved participants’ overall subjective impressions of the ECAs while putative quality had little or no... Read more

The area of animated interface agents is related to the development of applications that aim to improve humancomputer interaction process using software agents represented by characters or human figures. Although several projects are being developed in this area, there isn’t a method to describe criteria that ought to be considered to evaluate animated interface agents. This paper proposes basic guidelines for animated agents evaluation based on concepts provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We... Read more

An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive... Read more

In this paper, we present some initial thoughts on the occurrence of verbal abuse in human-chatterbot interaction within the framework of social-cognition. This thinking is an important step towards the understanding of virtual relationships and the design of socially adept technology. Read more

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. At a recent meeting on this subject, the above authors participated in a several day discussion on the question of virtual human... Read more

The objective of this chapter is to identify the common knowledge and practice in research methodology and to apply it to the field of software evaluation, especially of embodied conversational agents. Relevant issues discussed are: how to formulate a good research question, what research strategy to use, which data collection methods are most appropriate and how to select the right participants. Reliability and validity of the data sets are dealt with and finally the chapter... Read more

Imagine a future world where humans and machines will be involved in joint activities requiring social skills. This paper presents an overview of the dawnings of this world, concentrating on chatterbots – computer programs which engage the user in written conversation – and their users. Driving upon Clark’s theory of Language and the psychological theory of self-categorisation by Turner, it presents an analysis of social reactions to chatterbots and a taxonomy of the technology. The... Read more