Related papers: Emotional Interaction between Artificial Companion…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to…
Social isolation among older adults has become a critical concern, as reduced opportunities for conversation and weakened family relationships negatively affect mental health. This study proposes a dialogue agent that supports older adults…
The rapid advancement of AI companionship systems has positioned them as scalable interventions for addressing social isolation. Current design approaches emphasize maximizing user engagement and satisfaction, treating effective alignment…
This paper outlines the EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and plat-forms for future generations of Personalized Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people…
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This…
This study demonstrates how anticipated and actual interactions shape the QE of SARs among older adults. The study consisted of two parts: an online survey to explore the anticipated interaction through video viewing of a SAR and an…
Despite the growing potential of older adult care technologies, the adoption of these technologies remains challenging. In this work, we conducted a focus-group session with family caregivers to scope designs of the older adult care…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
This paper explores the growing presence of emotionally responsive artificial intelligence through a critical and interdisciplinary lens. Bringing together the voices of early-career researchers from multiple fields, it explores how AI…
The paper asserts that emulating empathy in human-robot interaction is a key component to achieve satisfying social, trustworthy, and ethical robot interaction with older people. Following comments from older adult study participants, the…
This paper explores the acceptance of human-AI love among young adults, particularly focusing on Chinese women in romantic or intimate relationships with AI companions. Through qualitative research, including 14 semi-structured interviews,…
Artificial agents capable of understanding and aligning with others' intentions are essential for safe and socially robust artificial intelligence. We introduce a computational framework for empathy in active inference agents, grounded in…
Being able to recognize emotions in human users is considered a highly desirable trait in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. However, most contemporary approaches rarely attempt to apply recognized emotional features in an active…
As the population continues to age, and gaming continues to grow as a hobby for older people, heterogeneity among older adult gamers is increasing. We argue that traditional game-based accessibility features, such as simplified input…
The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle. Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and monitor such…
In this paper, we present a study aimed at understanding whether the embodiment and humanlikeness of an artificial agent can affect people's spontaneous and instructed mimicry of its facial expressions. The study followed a mixed…
We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion includes listener empathy for the speaker's affective…
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative…
Human-like Agents with diverse and dynamic personalities could serve as an essential design probe in the process of user-centered design, thereby enabling designers to enhance the user experience of interactive applications. In this…
Agent-based modeling (ABM) has emerged as a powerful tool in social policy-making and socio-economics, offering a flexible and dynamic approach to understanding and simulating complex systems. While traditional analytic methods may be less…