Social role awareness in animated agents

  • Authors:

  • Helmut Prendinger;Mitsuru Ishizuka

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information and Communication Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan;Department of Information and Communication Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper promotes {\itshape social role awareness\/} as a desirable capability of animated agents, that are by now strong affective reasoners, but otherwise often lack the social competence observed with humans. In particular, humans may easily adjust their behavior depending on their respective role in a socio-organizational setting, whereas their synthetic pendants tend to be driven mostly by attitudes, emotions, and personality. Our main contribution is the incorporation of `social filter programs' to mental models of animated agents. Those programs may qualify an agent's expression of its emotional state by the social context, thereby enhancing the agent's believability as a conversational partner or virtual teammate. Our implemented system is entirely web-based and demonstrates socially aware animated agents in an environment similar to Hayes-Roth's Cybercaf\'{e}.