[Colloq] Hiring Talk: Wed. April 13, 11am - Timothy Bickmore

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Timothy Bickmore

Who will speak on:
Relational Agents: Effecting Change through
        Human-Computer Relationships

Wednesday, April 13, 2005
11:00am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build 
long-term, social-emotional relationships with users. My research in 
this area involves: 1) studying how people build relationships in 
face-to-face conversation in task settings and how these relationships 
are leveraged to maximize task outcomes; 2) designing this relational 
behavior into autonomous social interface agents; and 3) performing 
efficacy studies on the resulting systems. My work focuses on Relational 
Agents as a specialized kind of embodied conversational agent, which are 
animated humanoid software agents that use speech, gaze, gesture, 
intonation and other nonverbal modalities to communicate with users, so 
that both verbal and nonverbal relationship-building strategies can be 
used. This research involves elements of computational linguistics, 
computer graphics, planning, and human-computer interaction, and 
incorporates knowledge from social psychology and communication.

I have been conducting this work primarily in the health care domain, 
where the quality of relationship between patients and health providers 
has been demonstrated to be a significant factor in patient 
satisfaction, adherence and outcomes.  I will present work that I have 
done on two exercise coaching systems--one used in a study with MIT 
students and one used in a study with geriatrics patients--as well as 
earlier work on a real estate sales agent that used social dialog to 
build trust with potential buyers. I will discuss the underlying 
technologies used in these systems, as well as the results of user studies.

Bio:
Timothy Bickmore is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Medical 
Information Systems Unit at the Boston University School of Medicine. 
At BU, Dr. Bickmore has been developing health behavior change 
interventions involving the use of Relational Agents for the last two 
years. Prior to joining BU, Dr. Bickmore spent five years working 
towards his PhD in Media Arts & Sciences at MIT, studying in the Media 
Lab under Profs. Rosalind Picard (Affective Computing) and Justine 
Cassell (Gesture and Narrative Language). At MIT he developed a wide 
range of Embodied Conversational Agents and related technologies and 
performed several studies on human face-to-face conversation and 
evaluation studies of developed systems. Prior to MIT, Dr. Bickmore 
spent four years at the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab as a 
Consulting Scientist, before which he worked in Aerospace R&D labs in 
Northern California.

Host:  Peter Tarasewich