agent design echoes

Echoes - design of the agent

Building autonomous agents for children with autism

Aims for the agent -

p 46 ' to be able to act credibly both as a peer and as a tutor'

 achieve appropriately designed transactional support. 

Autonomy p 47 ' an agent that is able to decide independently how to act best in order to achieve a set if high level goals that have been delegated to it'

Be pro-active - engender motivation & attention

Reactive - adaptive

Have social ability - so that it can maximise the chances of the child experiencing a sense of self-efficacy

An ideal social agent with socio-emotional competence

ECHOES environment

12 learning activities that focus on two sub components that are challenging for children on the autistic spectrum -

(i) joint attention ( the ability to coordinate and share attention and emotions

(ii) symbol use -p48 ' understanding of meaning expressed through conventional gestures and words and ability to use non verbal means to share intentions'

Design for the agent

Derived from OCC and appraisal theory. OCC identifies 22 emotions. Agents provided with an affective system composed of emotional reaction rules, action tendencies, emotional thresholds, emotion decay rates

P 499 ' The agent experiences one or more of the 22 emotions of the OCC model based on its appraisal of the current external events and IRS subjective tendencies to experience certain emotions instead of others. The agents deal with these emotions by applying problem-focused or emotion-focused coping strategies

The agent

Advantages of an agent - tireless, persistent, consistent & positive

Positive, motivating, and supportive. Tends to be happy, does not get frustrated easily.

Actions - verbal (using simple language or key words), non-verbal (eye gaze and gesture)

Facial expression, a range of positive facial expressions ( involving lips, eyes, & eyebrows)

Evaluation

Response to bids for interaction ( post intervention cf Pre intention)

From the agent -  slight increase but not SS

From the human practitioner- did increase and almost reached SS

Initiation of bids

To the agent - numerical increase but not SS

To the human participant - very low and remained low

multidiscplinary - echoes

Porayanska -Pomsta et al

Key features, benefits challenges of a multi-disciplinary approach

Journal of Personal and ubiquitous Computing

Literature

22. - emotion recognition

25, 40 - understanding the mental states of others

6,18 - LFA engage with robots more than humans (shared attention, turn taking), fail to generalise to a real world context

37, 38,29 - wearables

42 - abilities of autism

46 importance of reciprocity

ECHOES a socio- cognitive intervention

Multidisciplinary - theories, practices, methods, scientific tradition. Establish common ground and draw on strengths p2 Novelty of the approach lies in the way in which different methods and techniques are combined and applied.

Goal- enable social interaction skills.

Aim - develop tools for research in this area

Affective system for an agent - emotion regulation, recognise emotions, categorise emotions, express emotions

Objects in a garden as the focus of joint attention

Monitors - head posture, eye gaze, facial expression, screen touch data

Retain the development of resources within the users community of practice

Pilot - as a small scale intervention. Subjective also contributes to the design of the resource

Theory of mind - impute others mental state

Joint attention - there is a strong visual component , both the object and the other

How are objects in ECHOES linked into a narrative?

Two challenges p122 SCERTS, on which ECHOES as an intervention is based was developed for a human-human intervention context, in which practitioners use their long term experiences. Multiple data sources on which to base the decision. ' Another challenge relates to whether the child perceives the agent as an intentional being or merely an inanimate object' reciprocity is important