Related papers: Embracing Companion Technologies
Identification within media, whether with real or fictional characters, significantly impacts users, shaping their behavior and enriching their social and emotional experiences. Immersive media, like video games, utilize virtual entities…
What does it mean to fall in love with something we know is virtual? The proliferation of conversational AI enables users to create customizable companions, fostering new intimate relationships that, while virtual, are perceived as…
Historically, researchers have focused on analyzing WEIRD, adult perspectives on technology. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for children and those from non-WEIRD countries. In this paper, we analyze children…
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,…
AI companions enable deep emotional relationships by engaging a user's sense of identity, but they also pose risks like unhealthy emotional dependence. Mitigating these risks requires first understanding the underlying process of identity…
We, as a society, need artists to help us interpret and explain science, but what does an artist's studio look like when today's science is built upon the language of large, increasingly complex data? This paper presents a data…
Advances in artificial intelligence have transformed the paradigm of human-computer interaction, with the development of conversational AI systems playing a pivotal role. These systems employ technologies such as natural language processing…
As anthropomorphic agents (AI and robots) are increasingly used in society, empathy and trust between people and agents are becoming increasingly important. A better understanding of agents by people will help to improve the problems caused…
As AI is increasingly being adopted into application solutions, the challenge of supporting interaction with humans is becoming more apparent. Partly this is to support integrated working styles, in which humans and intelligent systems…
Managing one's digital footprint is overwhelming, as it spans multiple platforms and involves countless context-dependent decisions. Recent advances in agentic AI offer ways forward by enabling holistic, contextual privacy-enhancing…
The advent of cyber-physical systems, such as robots and autonomous vehicles (AVs), brings new opportunities and challenges for the domain of interaction design. Though there is consensus about the value of human-centred development, there…
The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM) agents enables us to build agent-based intelligent systems that move beyond the role of a "tool" to become genuine collaborators with humans, thereby realizing a novel human-agent collaboration…
We introduce here the concept of Artificial General Creatures (AGC) which encompasses "robotic or virtual agents with a wide enough range of capabilities to ensure their continued survival". With this in mind, we propose a research line…
Science and technology journalists today face challenges in finding newsworthy leads due to increased workloads, reduced resources, and expanding scientific publishing ecosystems. Given this context, we explore computational methods to aid…
This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…
This article proposes an innovative framework to explore large audiovisual archives using Immersive Environments to place users inside a dataset and create an embodied experience. It starts by outlining the need for such a novel interface…
Hybrid work settings often lack the informal communication that naturally emerges from spontaneous encounters and ambient awareness of coworkers' activities, potentially hindering team collaboration. To address this challenge, we explored…
As technologies become more and more pervasive, there is a need for considering the affective dimension of interaction with computer systems to make them more human-like. Current demands for this matter include accurate emotion recognition,…
There is no 'ordinary' when it comes to AI. The human-AI experience is extraordinarily complex and specific to each person, yet dominant measures such as usability scales and engagement metrics flatten away nuance. We argue for AI…
AI co-writing systems challenge long held ideals about agency and ownership in the creative process, thereby hindering widespread adoption. In order to address this, we investigate conceptions of agency and ownership in AI creative…