Joana Campos

A computational approach towards conflict resolution for serious games

Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in which children may experiment with conflict resolution strategies and learn how to work towards positive conflict outcomes. While serious games related to conflict exist at present, our work represents the first attempt to teach conflict resolution skills through a game in a manner informed by sociological and psychological theories of conflict and current best practice for conflict resolution. In this paper, we present a computational approach to conflict generation and resolution. We describe the five phases involved in our conflict modeling process: conflict situation creation, conflict detection, player modeling and conflict strategy prediction, conflict management, and conflict resolution, and discuss the three major elements of our player model: assertiveness, cooperativeness, and relationship. Finally, we overview a simple resource management game we have developed in which we have begun experimenting with our conflict model concepts.

MAY: my memories are yours

In human relations engagement and continuous communication is promoted by the process of sharing experiences. This type of social behaviour plays an important role in the maintenance of relationships with our peers and it is grounded by cognitive features of memory. Aiming at creating agents that sustain long-term interactions, we developed MAY, a conversational virtual companion that gathers memories shared by the user into a three layer knowledge base, divided in Lifetime Periods, General Events and Event-Specific-Knowledge. We believe that its cue sensitive structure increases agent adaptability and gives it capabilities to perform in a social environment, being able to infer about the users common and uncommon events. Results show that these agents capabilities contribute to development of intimacy and companionship.

A personal approach: the persona technique in a companion's design lifecycle

Artificial companions are a new type of technology that is changing the way people interact with intelligent systems, by trying to build and sustain long term relationships with users. To evaluate such systems the typical usability methods for system evaluation are not enough, due to the need of accessing aspects such as social behaviour, emotional sensitivity and personalized interaction over long periods of time, with very specific users. In this paper, we describe the (full) design cycle of a companion system, arguing that a user-centred approach is the more appropriate, taking into account the referred specific issues. As such, to help us focus on developing a companion system for the prospective users, we based our design in the archetype of actual users - a persona. Furthermore, we brought this same concept into the evaluation phase in order to access the companion performance in a long-term interaction.

Looking for Conflict: Gaze Dynamics in a Dyadic Mixed-Motive Game

The way gaze cues are used in social interactions is by no means irrelevant because they are fundamentally important for understanding social interactions. In this paper, we argue that social conflict is a form of relating and that gaze clues are critical to understanding the underlying cognitive processes in this phenomenon. To learn more about conflict, we created an experimental setting that reduces real life to a mixed-motive game. We analyse the gaze patterns of 22 10- to 12-year-old children in specific game moments that could have been conductive to conflict. Our aim is to understand how subtle forms of conflict unfold, by analysing micro-level behaviours and establishing a link to high-level psychological constructs. Their gazes show that children are being more competitive or cooperative at different stages of the game. Children tend to avoid confrontation by averting face-directed gazes when they are asking for larger profits, and they gaze longer to attempt to persuade the other child.

Acoustic-Prosodic Automatic Personality Trait Assessment for Adults and Children

This paper investigates the use of heterogeneous speech corpora for automatic assessment of personality traits in terms of the Big-Five OCEAN dimensions. The motivation for this work is twofold: the need to develop methods to overcome the lack of children’s speech corpora, particularly severe when targeting personality traits, and the interest on cross-age comparisons of acoustic-prosodic features to build robust paralinguistic detectors. For this purpose, we devise an experimental setup with age mismatch utilizing the Interspeech 2012 Personality Sub-challenge, containing adult speech, as training data. As test data, we use a corpus of children’s European Portuguese speech. We investigate various features sets such as the Sub-challenge baseline features, the recently introduced eGeMAPS features and our own knowledge-based features. The preliminary results bring insights into cross-age and -language detection of personality traits in spontaneous speech, pointing out to a stable set of acoustic-prosodic features for Extraversion and Agreeableness in both adult and child speech.