DocNero's Rehm:M [7 articles]

Abstract

The user's behavior and his interpretation of interactions with others is influenced by his cultural background, which provides a number of heuristics or patterns of behavior and interpretation. This cultural influence on interaction has largely been neglected in HCI research due to two challenges: (i) grasping culture as a computational term and (ii) infering the user's cultural background by observable measures. In this paper, we describe how the Wiimote can be utilized to uncover the user's cultural background by analyzing his ...

Abstract

In this article, we propose an approach of nonverbal interaction with virtual agents to control agents' behavioral expressivity by extracting and combining acoustic and gestural features. The goal for this approach is twofold, (i) expressing individual features like situated arousal and personal style and (ii) transmitting this information in an immersive 3D environment by suitable means. ...

Abstract

In this paper we describe a research project that aims at providing a learning environment with virtual characters to train culture-specific nonverbal behavior in order to avoid unnecessary irritations in cross-cultural communication. It is shown that the use of virtual characters in the form of embodied conversational agents is beneficial for such an application. After a general description of the conceptual underpinnings of such a learning environment, a first prototype is presented that addresses the main challenges. ...

Abstract

Embodied conversational agents have been proven to be powerful tools for engaging users in interactions and thus are suitable for training scenarios that rely on a role-playing metaphor. In the CUBE-G project we propose an approach for culture-adaptive behavior generation of such agents, which can be employed in edutainment applications for increasing cultural awareness and for learning some of the appropriate behavior routines. In this paper we present the methodological approach of a standardized collection of multimodal behavioral corpora for different ...

Abstract

The cultural context of the user is a largely neglected aspect of human centered computing. This is because culture is a very fuzzy concept and even with a computational model of culture it remains difficult to derive the necessary information to recognize the user's cultural background. Such information is only indirectly available and has to be derived from the observable multimodal behavior of the user. We propose the usage of a dimensional model of culture that allows applying computational methods to ...

Abstract

In this paper, we present a game of dice that combines multi-party communication with a tangible interface. The game has been used as a testbed to study typical conversational behavior patterns in interactions between human users and synthetic agents. In particular, we were interested in the question to what extent the interaction with the agent can be considered as natural. As an evaluation criterion, we propose to investigate whether the communicative behaviors of humans differ when conversing with an agent as ...