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Projeto de investigação
Social Learning for Intelligent Characters
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Autores
Publicações
Prompting for socially intelligent agents with chatGPT
Publication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Guimarães, Manuel; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.
Socially Intelligent Agents (SIAs) have become increasingly popular in various contexts, including education and entertainment. However, creating complex social scenarios tailored to a designer's specific goals remains a significant challenge. The authoring burden can be substantial, limiting the potential of SIAs to deliver rich, engaging experiences. In this work, we propose leveraging the extensive knowledge stored within Large Language Models and use theory-driven prompting to extract social practices and identify appropriate social affordances for a scenario description. Our prompting approach aims to guide the system into considering the essential components (beliefs and desires) necessary to produce intentions, actions, and emotions(1). Results show that our approach produces large amounts of accurate and new information that can add value to the scenario. However, the process can introduce inaccuracies without human supervision.
FAtiMA toolkit: toward an accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agents
Publication . Mascarenhas, Samuel; Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Paiva, Ana
More 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.
MHeVA - mental health virtual assistant for high education students
Publication . Antunes, André; Guimarães, Manuel; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Boura, Carla; Campos, Joana
Current Higher Education Institutions' mental health support systems lack the capabilities to cope with the growing need and demand for mental health support from students. We introduce MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant - which was designed with the goal of creating an intelligent virtual agent that could serve as a first-line diagnostic-aid tool for mental health services across universities and faculties. Students interact with the agent which attempts to establish rapport and promotes disclosure through mental health state evaluation questions. In addition to this, MHeVA has the ability to assess self-reported anxiety levels, provide health improvement tips and flag the most severe cases.
In order to evaluate the agent's effectiveness, a user study was conducted that measured self-disclosure, rapport building, anxiety levels and stigma mitigation. Our findings suggest that MHeVA was able to elicit self-disclosure in higher education students and achieved high levels of acceptance and engagement.
The work presented further supports the potential benefits of using IVAs to encourage self-disclosure and to be integrated into existing mental health care systems.
The author’s journey—understanding and Improving the authoring process of theory-driven socially intelligent agents
Publication . Guimarães, Manuel; Campos, Joana; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Prada, Rui
State-of-the-art agent-modelling tools support the creation of powerful Socially Intelligent Agents (SIAs) capable of engaging in social interactions with participants in various roles and environments. However, their deployment demands a labourious authoring task as it is necessary to manually define behaviour rules and create content for different interaction scenarios.
While Socially Intelligent Agents (SIAs) research has centred on the user experience, we shift focus to the authors. To understand the challenges faced by authors who create these agents, we performed an innovative analysis of the authoring experience in modern agent modelling tools. One key finding is that, while SIA concepts are generally understandable, emotional-based concepts are not as easily comprehended or used by authors. We propose a hybrid solution approach that culminated in the development of Authoring-Assisted FAtiMA-Toolkit. The augmented agent modelling tool incorporates a data-driven Authoring Assistant to boost author productivity while promoting transparency and authorial control. To evaluate the impact of this framework on the authoring experience, we conducted a user study. Results showed that authors using the Authoring-Assisted FAtiMA-Toolkit were on average able to create more SIA-related content in less time.
Our findings suggest that data-augmented, theory-grounded agent modelling tools can support the development of affective social agents by reducing the authoring burden without sacrificing the framework’s clarity or the authors’ control over the content.
Unidades organizacionais
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Contribuidores
Financiadores
Entidade financiadora
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Programa de financiamento
Concurso para Financiamento de Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Todos os Domínios Científicos - 2017
Número da atribuição
PTDC/CCI-COM/30787/2017