The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents: 20 Years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics, Volume 1: Methods, Behavior, Cognition

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agent provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents, reason, decide how to interact, and express attitudes such as emotions, engagement, or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors, with the goal to support humans in various domains. Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs, while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students, and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved. In two volumes, the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research, in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior, focusing on multimodality. Finally, social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction, examined from different angles such as interaction in social space, group interaction, or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education, aging support, autism, and games. Contents Foreword • Justine Cassell 1 Introduction to Socially Interactive Agents • Birgit Lugrin PART I: ESTABLISHING SIA RESEARCH 2 Empirical Methods in the Social Science for Researching Socially Interactive Agents • Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten and Anna M. H. Abrams 3 Social Reactions to Socially Interactive Agents and Their Ethical Implications • Nicole Krämer and Arne Manzeschke PART II: APPEARANCE AND BEHAVIOR 4 Appearance • Rachel McDonnell and Bilge Mutlu 5 Natural Language Understanding in Socially Interactive Agents • Roberto Pieraccini 6 Building and Designing Expressive Speech Synthesis • Matthew P. Aylett, Leigh Clark, Benjamin R. Cowan, and Ilaria Torre 7 Gesture Generation • Carolyn Saund and Stacy Marsella 8 Multimodal Behavior Modeling for Socially Interactive Agents • Catherine Pelachaud, Carlos Busso, and Dirk Heylen PART III: SOCIAL COGNITION—MODELS AND PHENOMENA 9 Theory of Mind and Joint Attention • Jairo Perez-Osorio, Eva Wiese, and Agnieszka Wykowska 10 Emotion • Joost Broekens 11 Empathy and Prosociality in Social Agents • Ana Paiva, Filipa Correia, Raquel Oliveira, Fernando Santos, and Patrícia Arriaga 12 Rapport Between Humans and Socially Interactive Agents • Jonathan Gratch and Gale Lucas 13 Culture for Socially Interactive Agents • Birgit Lugrin and Matthias Rehm Authors’ Biographies Index Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students. __The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agent__