Toward Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user’s social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE intelligent systems 2022-09, Vol.37 (5), p.50-58
Main Authors: Kola, Ilir, Murukannaiah, Pradeep K., Jonker, Catholijn M., van Riemsdijk, M. Birna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agents (artificial intelligence)
Autonomous systems
Cognition
Computer architecture
Intelligent systems
Predictive models
Psychology
Roles
Sensor phenomena and characterization
Situational awareness
Social factors
Taxonomy
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user’s social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are presented through a conceptual architecture centered on two key ideas: 1) conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of “general” situation awareness, and 2) using situation taxonomies for such instantiation. This enables support agents to represent a user’s social situation, comprehend its meaning, and assess its impact on the user’s behavior. We discuss empirical results supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach and illustrate how the architecture can be used in support agents through two use cases.
ISSN:1541-1672
1941-1294
DOI:10.1109/MIS.2022.3163625