Robots increasingly have the potential to interact with people in daily life. It is believed that, based on this ability, they will play an essential role in human society in the not-so-distant future. This article examined the proposition that robots could form relationships with children and that children might learn from robots as they learn from other children. In this article, this idea is studied in an 18-day field trial held at a Japanese elementary school. Two English-speaking "Robovie" robots interacted with first- and sixth-grade pupils at the perimeter of their respective classrooms. Using wireless identification tags and sensors, these robots identified and interacted with children who came near them. The robots gestured and spoke English with the children, using a vocabulary of about 300 sentences for speaking and 50 words for recognition. The children were given a brief picture--word matching English test at the start of the trial, af- CONTENTS 1.2. Social Relationships Over Time 3.2. The Robot and Its Behavior Interactive Humanoid Robot "Robovie" Person Identification Interactive Behaviors 3.3. Procedure 3.4. Data Collection Time Spent Interacting With the Robot Tests of English Skills 4.2. Grade Differences 4.3. Social Interaction 5.1. Contributions to Human--Robot Interaction Methodology 5.2. Contributions to the Theory of Human--Robot Interaction 5.3. Contributions to the Design of Human--Robot Interaction Not ter 1 week and after 2 weeks. Interactions were counted using the tags, and video and audio were recorded. In the majority of cases, a child's friends were present during the interactions.

As a platform for community networks, information spaces using the city metaphor are being developed around the world. We see the concept of digital cities as being a social information infrastructure for urban everyday life (including shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on).

This paper describes a discussion-bot, which provides answers to students ’ discussion board questions in an unobtrusive and human-like way. Using information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, the discussion-bot identifies the questioner’s interest, mines suitable answers from an annotated corpus of 1236 archived threaded discussions and 279 course documents, and generates a human-like reply. A novel modeling approach was designed for the analysis of archived threaded discussions to facilitate answer extraction. We compare a self-out and an all-in evaluation of the mined answers. The results show that the discussion-bot can begin to meet students ’ learning requests. We discuss directions that might be taken to increase the effectiveness of the question matching and answer extraction algorithms. The research takes place in the context of an undergraduate computer science course.

As new communications media foster international collaborations, we would be remiss in overlooking cultural differences when assessing them. In this study, 24 pairs in three cultural groupings---American-American (AA), ChineseChinese (CC) and American-Chinese (AC) --worked on two decision-making tasks, one face-to-face and the other via IM. Drawing upon prior research, we predicted differences in conversational efficiency, conversational content, interaction quality, persuasion, and performance. The quantitative results combined with conversation analysis suggest that the groups viewed the task differently---AA pairs as an exercise in situation-specific compromise; CC as consensus-reaching. Cultural differences were reduced but not eliminated in the IM condition.

Embodied conversational agents provide a promising option for presenting information to users. This contribution revisits a number of past and ongoing systems with animated characters that have been developed at DFKI. While in all systems the purpose of using characters is to convey information to the user, there are significant variations in the style of presentation and the assumed conversational setting. The spectrum of systems include systems that feature a single, TV-style presentation agent, dialogue systems, as well as systems that deploy multiple interactive characters. We also provide a technical view on these systems and sketch the underlying system architectures of each sample system.

The three-dimensional models used to embody intelligent agents are becoming increasingly realistic. We discuss two studies in which we embodied intelligently behaving virtual agents with photographically realistic models of human subjects' heads and faces. We then immersed those subjects with agents embodied with their virtual selves and compared their interactions and nonverbal behaviors to separate subjects who were immersed with agents embodied with virtual others. Subjects treated agents embodied with their virtual selves fundamentally differently than agents embodied with virtual others in regards to both measured nonverbal behaviors and questionnaire ratings. Implications for systems incorporating realistic embodied agents are discussed.

This paper presents a system called AgentSalon, which facilitates face-to-face knowledge exchange and discussion by people having shared interests, in museums, schools, o#ces, academic conferences, etc. This system was designed as a sub-system of our ongoing project to construct a personal agent system for tour guidance and knowledge sharing among users. AgentSalon has a big screen for two to five users. The screen shows conversations among animated agents belonging to the users. The personal agent usually runs on our mobile guidance system, called PalmGuide, and guides its user according to his/her individual interests and touring records. When users connect their PalmGuides with AgentSalon by infrared, their personal agents with their personal information migrate to AgentSalon and engage in automated conversation. Contents of the conversation include opinion exchange about tour experiences, mutual recommendations of exhibits on behalf of the users, etc. By observing a chat of the agents, users can e#ectively obtain appropriate topics: that is, tempts them to follow the chat. This paper shows the first prototype of AgentSalon provided to participants in an academic conference.

The ability of artificial characters to express emotions is essential for the natural interaction with humans. Their absence could be interpreted as coldness towards the user. Artificial characters can have different embodiments. Screen characters and robotic characters are currently among the most widely used. This study investigates the influence of the character’s embodiment on how users perceive the character’s emotional expressions. The results show that there is no significant difference in the perceived intensity and recognition accuracy between a robotic character and a screen character. Another important aspect of the character is its ability to express different emotional intensity levels. Developers create different geometrical intensity levels of emotional expressions by equally dividing the spatial difference of each facial component between the neutral and maximum expression. However, the relationship between this geometrical intensity and the intensity perceived by the user might not be strictly linear. This study shows that also a quadratic trend is present in this relationship and that10 % steps increase of geometrical intensity can often be distinguished whereas 20 % steps can be distinguished almost all the time.

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