Social 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 ...

Group conversation is a frequently used form of communication for exchanging ideas and making decisions. Cohesion is an emergent phenomenon that describes the members' attraction towards the group and towards working together. In this paper, we present ...

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as ...

Job advertisements in white male-dominated organizations are often biased in ways that discourage female and minority candidates from applying. We explored the use of a female African American virtual agent who provides a first-person reaction to a ...

A virtual guide in an immersive virtual environment allows users a structured experience without missing critical information. However, although being in an interactive medium, the user is only a passive listener, while the embodied conversational agent ...

Conversational agents are getting increasingly popular and find applications in health and customer services. Conversations in these fields are often emotionally charged. It is, therefore, necessary to handle the conversation with some degree of empathy ...

The COVID-19 crisis has generated an increase of sleep problems in the general population. Digital technologies can help dealing with mental health repercussions of COVID-19 but their acceptance by the population need to be better understood. KANOPEE is ...

Virtual human technologies are now being widely explored as therapy tools for mental health disorders including depression and anxiety. These technologies leverage the ability of the virtual agents to engage in naturalistic social interactions with a ...

Creativity is a vital inherent human trait. In an attempt to stimulate children's creativity, we present the design and evaluation of an interaction between a child and a social robot in a storytelling context. Using a software interface, children were ...

In the context of mental wellness support, trust and intimacy between a counselor and a patient are necessary to converge healing processes positively. However, convincing students to trust a virtual human for topics regarding mental wellness is a ...

Research on creation of virtual humans enables increasing automatization of their behavior, including synthesis of verbal and nonverbal behavior. As the achievable realism of different aspects of agent design evolves asynchronously, it is important to ...

In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 90 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practice in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social ...

Sexual harassment (SH) training is a major public health priority, and available programs show limited efficacy. We present a new application for virtual agents in virtual reality (VR), which has the potential to deliver SH training that imitates real ...

Women earn less than men in technical fields. Competing theories have been offered to explain this disparity. Some argue that women underperform in negotiating their salary, in-part due to language in job descriptions, called gender triggers, which ...

We propose the first approach to synthesize the synchronous 3D conversational body and hand gestures, as well as 3D face and head animations, of a virtual character from speech input. Our algorithm uses a CNN architecture that leverages the inherent ...

A major impediment to the success of virtual agents is the inability of non-technical experts to easily author content. To address this barrier we present VHMason, a multimodal authoring tool designed to help creative authors build embodied ...

Access to healthcare advice is crucial to promote healthy societies. Many factors shape how access might be constrained, such as economic status, education or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, remote consultations with health practitioners. Our work ...

There is a new crisis emerging in human-agent interaction research: Instead of using validated questionnaires, individual studies are creating new questionnaires that claim to measure identical constructs. This makes replication studies and comparisons ...

This paper proposes a method to shift an agent's personality during speech interaction to reduce users' negative impressions of speech recognition systems when speech recognition fails. Speech recognition failure makes users uncomfortable, and the ...

The listener's backchannel has the important function of encouraging a current speaker to hold their turn and continue to speak, which enables smooth conversation. The listener monitors the speaker's turn-management (a.k.a. speaking and listening) ...

Understanding an opponent's wants is crucial for maximizing the outcomes of a multi-issue negotiation. To do this, automated systems must build an "opponent model" from information conveyed during a negotiation. Bayesian and frequentist models are the ...

We propose a new framework for gesture generation, aiming to allow data-driven approaches to produce more semantically rich gestures. Our approach first predicts whether to gesture, followed by a prediction of the gesture properties. Those properties ...

Prior research often finds increased altruism following natural disasters. One explanation is the social heuristic hypothesis: humans are prosocial by nature but become self-interested when they have the opportunity to deliberate. As the stress of a ...

We present Friendly Face - a virtual agent designed to reduce public speaking anxiety by standing within an audience. The agent senses the speaker's behavior during an oral presentation and provides emotional and instrumental support. The system ...

Non-verbal communication body cues are paramount to interact. In this preliminary work, we explore ways to let Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) simulating nonverbal communication capabilities. We propose an approach to control IVAs' reactive behaviour ...

To personalise dialogue to different users, relational agents need to learn about the users' preferences for relational cues used by the agent. In the context of a virtual advisor to reduce students' study stress, we designed a between subjects study ...

This paper presents a grammar-based evolutionary model to facilitate autonomous emergence of task allocation for intelligent multi-agent systems. The approach adopts a context-free grammar to determine the behaviour rule syntax. This allows for ...

Maintaining hand hygiene is the one of the most effective way to prevent the spread of germs during a pandemic. This paper focuses on encouraging people to use a hand sanitizer more frequently by applying the nudge theory to improve hand hygiene ...

Children are raised with technologies that are able to respond to them in natural language. This not only makes it easy to communicate but also to connect with them socially. While communication abilities might have benefits (e.g., for learning), it ...