Papers by Timothy Bickmore
AI Magazine, Sep 15, 2006
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford Univ... more The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Computer Science Department, was pleased to present its 2006 Spring Symposium Series held March 27-29, 2006, at Stanford University, California. The titles of the eight symposia were (1) Argumentation for Consumers of Health Care (chaired by Nancy Green);(2) Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI Hard Problems (chaired by Christian Lebiere);(3) Computational Approaches to Analyzing ...
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015
Background: Preconception care is a possible solution to disparities in maternity outcomes, and r... more Background: Preconception care is a possible solution to disparities in maternity outcomes, and recent literature shows that technology may be an effective mode of intervention. Recommendations of how to make technology culturally acceptable for African American women have not been examined. Methods: Twenty-four African American females between the ages of 15 and 21 were recruited from community-based sites and participated in focus groups. Using approaches derived from grounded theory, patterns and themes were identified in the focus group interview data and used to develop an on-line educational preconception care program. Participants were invited back to use the program that included completing a health risk assessment, receiving education from a Virtual Patient Advocate (VPA) about identified risks, listening to and writing personal health narratives, and creating a health to-do list to address the identified risks. Findings: The participants reported trusting the VPA, and stat...
Knowledge-Based Systems, 2001
Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engagi... more Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engaging. However, results on the effectiveness of these interfaces for task completion have been mixed. In this paper, we argue that embodiment can serve an even stronger function if system designers use actual human conversational protocols in the design of the interface. Communicative behaviors such as salutations and farewells, conversational turn-taking with interruptions, and describing objects using hand gestures are examples of protocols that all native speakers of a language already know how to perform and can thus be leveraged in an intelligent interface. We discuss how these protocols are integrated into Rea, an embodied, multi-modal interface agent who acts as a real-estate salesperson, and we show why embodiment is required for their successful implementation.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI 09, 2009
Ninety million Americans have inadequate health literacy, resulting in a reduced ability to read ... more Ninety million Americans have inadequate health literacy, resulting in a reduced ability to read and follow directions in the healthcare environment. We describe an animated, empathic virtual nurse interface for educating and counseling hospital patients with inadequate health literacy in their hospital beds at the time of discharge. The development methodology, design rationale, and two iterations of user testing are described. Results indicate that hospital patients with low health literacy found the system easy to use, reported high levels of satisfaction, and most said they preferred receiving the discharge information from the agent over their doctor or nurse. Patients also expressed appreciation for the time and attention provided by the virtual nurse, and felt that it provided an additional authoritative source for their medical information.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. ... more We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. We describe an empirical study of human-human dialogue, analyzing gaze behavior during the production of fillers and use this data to develop a model of agent-based gaze behavior. We find that speakers are significantly more likely to gaze away from their dialogue partner while uttering fillers, especially if the filler occurs at the beginning of a speaking turn. This model is evaluated in a preliminary experiment. Results indicate mixed attitudes towards an agent that uses conversational fillers in its speech.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide we... more Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide web to standard web browsers are presented. DTask is a hierarchical task decomposition-based dialogue planner, based on the CEA-2018 task description language standard. LiteBody is an extensible, web-based BML renderer that runs in most contemporary web browsers with no additional software and provides a conversational virtual agent with a range of conversational nonverbal behavior adequate for many user-agent interaction applications. Together, these tools provide a complete platform for deploying web-based conversational agents, and are actively being used on two health counseling applications.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
Text, Speech and Language Technology, 2005
The functions of social dialogue between people in the context of performing a task is discussed,... more The functions of social dialogue between people in the context of performing a task is discussed, as well as approaches to modelling such dialogue in embodied conversational agents. A study of an agent's use of social dialogue is presented, comparing embodied interactions with similar interactions conducted over the phone, assessing the impact these media have on a wide range of behavioural, task and subjective measures. Results indicate that subjects' perceptions of the agent are sensitive to both interaction style (social vs. task-only dialogue) and medium.
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '01, 2001
Building trust with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as financial transacti... more Building trust with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as financial transactions, and some minimal degree of trust is required in all applications to even initiate and maintain an interaction with a user. Humans use a variety of relational conversational strategies, including small talk, to establish trusting relationships with each other. We argue that such strategies can also be used by interface agents, and that embodied conversational agents are ideally suited for this task given the myriad cues available to them for signaling trustworthiness. We describe a model of social dialogue, an implementation in an embodied conversation agent, and an experiment in which social dialogue was demonstrated to have an effect on trust, for users with a disposition to be extroverts.
Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors and computing systems - CHI '04, 2004
The perception of feeling cared for has beneficial consequences in education, psychotherapy, and ... more The perception of feeling cared for has beneficial consequences in education, psychotherapy, and medicine. Results from a longitudinal study of simulated caring by a computer are presented, in which 60 subjects interacted with a computer agent daily for a month, half with a "caring" agent and half with an agent that did not use behaviors to demonstrate caring. The perception of caring by subjects in the "caring" condition was significantly higher after four weeks, and was also reflected in qualitative interviews with them, and in a significantly higher reported willingness to continue working with the "caring" agent. This paper presents the techniques that contributed to the increased perception of caring, and presents some of the implications of this new technology.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate per... more We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories ("back stories") to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and retention in the intervention. A longitudinal randomized controlled experiment tested user attitudes towards the agent when it presented the stories in first person (as its own history) compared to third person (as happening to humans that it knew). Participants in the first person condition reported enjoying their interactions with the agent significantly more and completed more conversations with the agent, compared to participants in the third person condition, while ratings of agent dishonesty were not significantly different between the groups.
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Papers by Timothy Bickmore