Florian Pecune

AAMAS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Field Trial Analysis of Socially Aware Robot Assistant

• Florian Pecune
• Jingya Chen
• Yoichi Matsuyama
• Justine Cassell

The Socially-Aware Robot Assistant (SARA) is an embodied conversational agent that works toward using detection of visual, vocal and verbal cues as an input to estimate the strength of its relationship (namely the level of rapport) with a user. SARA then answers to the user through similar visual, vocal and verbal behaviors with the goal of building and maintaining rapport with that user as we hypothesize that this will improve task performance and user satisfaction over time. In this paper, we report results of a field trial with a semi-automatic SARA system that took place in a large high-profile conference. Participants interacted with SARA during the whole conference, receiving recommendations about sessions to attend and/or people to meet. We analyzed these interactions to shed light on the dynamics of the rapport level between SARA and the conference attendees, and investigate how SARA’s task performance would influence the evolution of rapport over time. Although we did not find evidence supporting our claim that the recommendations’ outcomes would influence rapport dynamics, our findings emphasize the importance of interactional features plays in both rapport and SARA’s task performance. We thus propose design guidelines for the next generation of socially aware personal assistants.

AAMAS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Socially-Conditioned Task Reasoning for a Virtual Tutoring Agent

• Zian Zhao
• Michael Madaio
• Florian Pecune
• Yoichi Matsuyama
• Justine Cassell

Virtual agents have been shown to be more effective when incorporating social factors such as trust into task action selection. However, there has been less work on how virtual tutoring agents can incorporate social factors into pedagogical action selection. We propose and evaluate how a socially-conditioned task reasoner for a virtual pedagogical agent can incorporate both task and social factors into task reasoning. Our work contributes to the autonomous agent community by providing further evidence that incorporating information about dyadic social factors (e. g. rapport) can be beneficial for agents’ task reasoning in the case of a tutoring agent.

AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

SOCRATES: from SOCial Relation to ATtitude ExpressionS

• Florian Pecune
• Magalie Ochs
• Stacy Marsella
• Catherine Pelachaud

To be perceived as believable partners in human-machine interactions, virtual agents have to express adequate social attitudes. The social attitude expressed by an agent should reflect the social situation of the interaction. The agent ought to take into account its role and its social relation toward its interactants when deciding how to react in the interaction. To build such an agent able to reason about its role and relation and to adapt its social attitude, we build a model of social decision making. First, we formalize the dynamics of the social relation through a combination of goals and beliefs. Then, we design a decision making model based on the social goals and the situational goals of the agent.

AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

LOL — Laugh Out Loud

• Florian Pecune
• Beatrice Biancardi
• Yu Ding
• Catherine Pelachaud
• Maurizio Mancini
• Giovanna Varni
• Antonio Camurri
• Gualtiero Volpe