Browsing by Author "Prada, Rui"
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- EEG Mode: emotional episode generation for social sharing of emotionsPublication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.; Prada, RuiSocial sharing of emotions (SSE) occurs when one communicates their feelings and reactions to a certain event in the course of a social interaction. The phenomenon is part of our social fabric and plays an important role in creating empathetic responses and establishing rapport. Intelligent social agents capable of SSE will have a mechanism to create and build long-term interaction with humans. In this paper, we present the Emotional Episode Generation (EEG) model, a fine-tuned GPT-2 model capable of generating emotional social talk regarding multiple event tuples in a human-like manner. Human evaluation results show that the model successfully translates one or more event-tuples into emotional episodes, reaching quality levels close to human performance. Furthermore, the model clearly expresses one emotion in each episode as well as humans. To train this model we used a public dataset and built upon it using event extraction techniques(1).
- FAtiMA toolkit: toward an accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agentsPublication . Mascarenhas, Samuel; Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Paiva, AnaMore than a decade has passed since the development of FearNot!, an application designed to help children deal with bullying through role-playing with virtual characters. It was also the application that led to the creation of FAtiMA, an affective agent architecture for creating autonomous characters that can evoke empathic responses. In this article, we describe the FAtiMA Toolkit, a collection of open-source tools that is designed to help researchers, game developers, and roboticists incorporate a computational model of emotion and decision-making in their work. The toolkit was developed with the goal of making FAtiMA more accessible, easier to incorporate into different projects, and more flexible in its capabilities for human-agent interaction, based upon the experience gathered over the years across different virtual environments and human-robot interaction scenarios. As a result, this work makes several different contributions to the field of Agent-Based Architectures. More precisely, the FAtiMA Toolkit’s library-based design allows developers to easily integrate it with other frameworks, its meta-cognitive model affords different internal reasoners and affective components, and its explicit dialogue structure gives control to the author even within highly complex scenarios. To demonstrate the use of the FAtiMA Toolkit, several different use cases where the toolkit was successfully applied are described and discussed.
- Heroine’s learning journey: motivating women in stem online courses through the power of a narrativePublication . Costa, Luis Felipe Coimbra; Gomes, Samuel; Santos, Ana Moura; Xexéo, Geraldo Bonorino; De Lima, Yuri Oliveira; Prada, Rui; Martinho, Carlos; Dias, JoãoAlthough Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are essential for the development of society, men hugely outnumber women in the majority of STEM fields in higher education, a factor that hinders inclusion and restricts the possibility of having different points-of-view. Previous studies indicate multiple causes of low female motivation in STEM degrees and careers, which inspired several initiatives to increase female interest in STEM. A proven way to captivate an audience to change its attitude is the heroic narrative model, a style of narrative in which a character goes through a sequence of difficulty-increasing and attitude-shaping quests. This paper proposes a heroic narrative model named Heroine's Learning Journey (HLJ) targeted at counteracting low female participation in STEM courses. In particular, the HLJ model is developed especially for enhancing STEM online courses, by using a narrative that can encourage female students to engage and prevail in them. The HLJ model is divided into three acts, each composed of several stages symbolizing steps tailored to a female student's development. The model was applied to set up the structure of a preexisting Machine Learning online course with hundreds of enrolled students. Although a first version of the course already presented a higher-than-expected female enrollment per se (approximate to 37.3%), with HLJ, we verified an even higher female enrollment (approximate to 59.2% ), slightly surpassing male enrollments. The feedback provided in learners' responses to a final, voluntary and anonymous questionnaire, allowed to obtain the degree of satisfaction of participants at the end of the course with the HLJ. The responses indicated that, at the end of the second edition of the online course, students were able to acknowledge the existence of a STEM gender imbalance, and appreciated the motivating nature of the HLJ model. From several student's feedback and comments submitted in the questionnaire, one can conclude that the attitude-shaping character of the HLJ was greatly appreciated, in addition to the technical content of the course. All these preliminary results are indicative of the usability of HLJ to foster gender balance in STEM online courses. Thus, the present study contributes to STEM Education by leveraging the motivation of young women to enter and prevail in these areas of study.
- ISPO: a serious game to train the interview skills of police officersPublication . Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Soeiro, Cristina; Guerra, Raquel; Steiner-Stanitznig, Christina; Molinari, AndreaThe training of Police Interview competencies relies on the hiring of actors to play the role of victims, witnesses and suspects. While role-play can be a particularly effective training technique, it requires a significant amount of resources. The Interview Sim-ulation for Police Officers (ISPO) is a serious game developed as a collaboration of Gameware Europe with the Portuguese School of Police Officers. The objective of the game is to train police officers in communication competencies related to the interview of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Through ISPO, players can take the role of a police interviewer and practice the techniques and methodologies learned in theoretical classes. The serious game offers a safe, lightweight and easily repeatable experience. In order to evaluate the training effectiveness of the serious game, a study was con-ducted with 194 participants where general subjective learning effectiveness was mea-sured. Overall, the ISPO game improved the self-perceived competence of its players. Additionally, participants changed their opinion regarding the most valuable attitudes necessary to conduct a successful interview. Finally, the interaction with the game had a stronger effect on inexperienced users. These results lead us to believe that ISPO can be an added value to police officer schools.
- The HUB: Designing an interactive social space for pre-adolescents’ well-beingPublication . Rodrigues, Pedro; Mitic, Marija; Krammer, Ina; Dias, João; Prada, Rui; Schrank, BeateFriendships are a fundamental source of support during challenging times, especially among pre-adolescents. The current pandemic situation makes it even harder to rely on support from their peers or strengthen friendships. To accompany and support pre-adolescents outside of school at a moment where most interactions happen online, we propose the HUB, a novel online interactive social space. The HUB is a safeguarded and monitored social space which seeks to improve social well-being and positive reinforcement practices between peers by design. This paper's key contributions derived from designing the HUB are threefold: an online social space which follows an iterative user-centered design approach; it is grounded on a theoretical model of friendship development to scaffold interactions of dyadic relationships that occur on the HUB; and it employs a set of gamification strategies, such as quests, achievements and rewards to keep pre-adolescents motivated, and, particularly, an acknowledgement system that encourages peers to work on, and acknowledge, character strengths and social skills in others, which are fundamental for their development as individuals.