Human communication literature states that people with different culture backgrounds act differently in conversations. Currently most virtual agents are designed for a single targeted popular culture. We implemented two versions of a virtual agent targeting American and Chinese cultures. We found that users from different culture context express engagement differently.

Jovanovic and Nyarko (1996) showed that when agents learn-by-doing and are myopic, less advanced agents may adopt new technologies while more advanced ̄rms stick with the old technology since the new technology takes time to learn. In this case, the less advanced agents might eventually overtake (or \leapfrog") the advanced agents. We show that this kind of overtaking can also occur if agents ar...

One of the effects of population ageing is the increase in the proportion of long-term chronic diseases, which require new therapeutical models that mostly take place at the patients’ home rather than inside a health care institution. This requires that patients autonomously follow their prescribed treatment, which can be especially difficult for patients suffering some kind of cognitive impair...

Human interaction depends on several individual factors such as personality, social relations, age or gender. But also the society we live in influences our behaviour. Thus culture affects the way communication is led. As virtual agents interact in a more and more human-like manner, culture-specific behaviour should also be taken into account. In this paper, we investigate communication managem...

We argue that taking surprise into account in the artificial agents’s reasoning may have advantageous implications in various situations. Relying on theoretical and empirical evidence, our arguments are supported by the application of surprise-based agents to three different domains, namely exploration of unknown environments, divergent production and evaluation of creative products, and select...

The paper presents some of the results obtained within a research project aimed at developing ET (English Tutor), an intelligent tutoring system which supports Italian students in learning the English verbs. We concentrate on one of the most important modules of the system, the domain (i.e. verb) expert which is devoted to generate, in a cognitively transparent way, the right tense for the verb...

This paper aims to show that the Agent Interaction Protocol (AIP), a subset of the Agent UML working document can provide a suitable technique for modeling the dynamic aspect of Intelligent Agents. A case study was conducted using thirty software architects fluent in UML to show the clarity of AIP diagrams and the efficacy of the models in conveying the dynamic aspects of Intelligent Agents. In...

Intelligent Environments are able to support ever-changing environmental needs by automatically and dynamically adjusting their key parameters without explicit human intervention. However, the current development of Intelligent Environments primarily focuses on the technical aspects of the physical components, and does not give sufficient consideration to the dynamic interrelationship between p...

This paper presents possibilities offered by public intelligent environment to foster learning through serendipitous interaction among uncoupled users. Four possible situations of how serendipitous interaction may occur and lead to learning activities are presented. In these situations capturing the right information, modeling it and providing awareness information back to the users plays a maj...

2 1541-1672/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Published by the IEEE Computer Society Letters to the Editor: Send letters, including a reference to the article in question, to [email protected]. Letters will be edited for clarity and length. Articles: If you’re interested in submitting an article for publication, see our author guidelines at www.computer.org/ intelligent/author.htm...