CATCH : Human-agent social collaboration(s) during collaborative tasks

Co-advisors : Catherine Pelachaud (ISIR), Domitile Lourdeaux (UTC),
Indira Thouvenin (UTC)

The topic of the post-doc focuses on an interaction of a human user with
one or more Embodied Conversational Agents to perform a collaborative
manipulation task in a virtual environment. The interaction takes place
through verbal and non-verbal communication as well as by the
manipulation of objects in a virtual environment displayed in a CAVE.

The main topic of the post-doc is the consideration of the social
attitudes of the agents, at the decision-making level, their impact on
the cognitive and nonverbal behavior of the human, and the quality of
the interaction as perceived by the human. The originality of the
post-doc is to give the human being a strong immersion in the
collaboration (during a joint action resolution) with ACAs by the
addition of non-verbal behaviors and by taking into account manipulation
gesture of the human.

A social attitude is a combination of spontaneous assessment of a
situation and of strategic intentions (Scherer, 2005). Most
computational models have integrated the first aspect by simulating the
emotional expressions of agents. Few studies have looked at the impact
of social attitudes on decision-making.

However, previous works do not consider social attitudes in the
resolution of collaborative tasks.

The post-doc aims to attack several scientific challenges:

Challenge 1: What are the important / essential determinants in social
attitudes for collaborative work? Which social interactions to transpose
in virtual reality?

Challenge 2: How to operationalize these social attitudes in a
decision-making engine to represent the non-verbal, verbal and
decisional behaviors of embodied conversational agents?

Challenge 3: What types of adaptive feedback on social attitudes will
affect human's behavior in an immersive virtual environment?

Challenge 4: How to define a metric to measure the impact of social
attitudes in collaborative work in virtual reality?

Skills: Artificial Intelligence, embodied conversational agent, virtual
reality

Position: post-doctoral

Duration: 1 year

Host Organization: ISIR, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris;
Travel to Compiègne to work in the CAVE VR

Documents to send: CV, motivation letter, reference names

Contact:

- Catherine Pelachaud, catherine.pelachaud@isir.upmc.fr
- Indira Thouvenin, indira.thouvenin@utc.fr
- Domitile Lourdeaux, domitile.lourdeaux@hds.utc.fr