My desire to get involved with Research was one of the primary factors that attracted me to Northeastern, and in Fall 2007, I got an opportunity to work with Prof. Timothy Bickmore and the Relational Agents Group.
The Relational Agents Group develops and studies virtual characters, or computer agents designed to form long-term social-emotional relationships with their users, use these strategies to function as coaches or counselors.
As the coursework of the Empricial Methods in Research course I took in Spring 2008, I designed and ran an experimental study to evaluate the effects of interpersonal touch with such relational agents, and we are still continuing some of these studies.
For the first half of the Thesis I intend to complete in Fall '09, I started implementing a framework that would allow such agents to use an arbitrary document and dynamically explain portions of it, and I am in the process of experimentally evaluating this for my thesis.