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Professor Tim Bickmore Receives NSF CAREER Award

Professor Tim Bickmore was awarded a $500,000 grant through The National Science Foundation's "Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program". This is the foundation's most prestigious award in support of the development activities of new scholars who most effectively integrate the research and education missions of their universities. Limited to junior faculty, CAREER awards provide scholars with the support needed to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. An overview of Professor Bickmore's grant is provided by the following abstract:

Abstract:

The primary objective of this research effort is to study how social interface agents can conduct very long-term interactions with users-spanning months or years of daily use-and the impacts these interactions can have on user education, behavior change and overall wellbeing. A secondary objective is the development of a networked software architecture and experimental methodology to support very long-term human-computer interaction studies, in which new experiments and agent capabilities can be dynamically integrated into a running system serving a persistent group of human subjects. To be effective in both maintaining long term interaction and achieving positive task outcomes, the agents developed will need to be able to interact naturally with users, forming social-emotional relationships with them over time. In addition to addressing basic science objectives, this "Virtual Laboratory" will also be used as a teaching tool in the graduate Computer Science course in Human-Computer Interaction, the undergraduate Information Science course in Empirical Research Methods and a planned course in Behavioral Informatics.

While these social interface agents have broad applicability, this project will target one application domain-physical activity promotion-and one user group-urban older adults from the Geriatriacs Ambulatory Practice at Boston Medical Center-in order to focus and ground the research.