Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2005

Relational Agents: Effecting Change through Human-Computer Relationships

Speaker: Tim Bickmore (Boston University School of Medicine)

Date: April 13, 2005

Talk: 11:00 am, 366 WVH

Abstract

Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build long-term, social-emotional relationships with users. My research in this area involves: 1) studying how people build relationships in face-to-face conversation in task settings and how these relationships are leveraged to maximize task outcomes; 2) designing this relational behavior into autonomous social interface agents; and 3) performing efficacy studies on the resulting systems. My work focuses on Relational Agents as a specialized kind of embodied conversational agent, which are animated humanoid software agents that use speech, gaze, gesture, intonation and other nonverbal modalities to communicate with users, so that both verbal and nonverbal relationship-building strategies can be used. This research involves elements of computational linguistics, computer graphics, planning, and human-computer interaction, and incorporates knowledge from social psychology and communication. I have been conducting this work primarily in the health care domain, where the quality of relationship between patients and health providers has been demonstrated to be a significant factor in patient satisfaction, adherence and outcomes. I will present work that I have done on two exercise coaching systems--one used in a study with MIT students and one used in a study with geriatrics patients--as well as earlier work on a real estate sales agent that used social dialog to build trust with potential buyers. I will discuss the underlying technologies used in these systems, as well as the results of user studies.

Biography

Timothy Bickmore is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Medical Information Systems Unit at the Boston University School of Medicine. At BU, Dr. Bickmore has been developing health behavior change interventions involving the use of Relational Agents for the last two years. Prior to joining BU, Dr. Bickmore spent five years working towards his PhD in Media Arts & Sciences at MIT, studying in the Media Lab under Profs. Rosalind Picard (Affective Computing) and Justine Cassell (Gesture and Narrative Language). At MIT he developed a wide range of Embodied Conversational Agents and related technologies and performed several studies on human face-to-face conversation and evaluation studies of developed systems. Prior to MIT, Dr. Bickmore spent four years at the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab as a Consulting Scientist, before which he worked in Aerospace R&D labs in Northern California.