New Publication:
The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents
20 Years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics
Volume 1: Establishing SIA Research, Appearance and Behaviour, Social Cognition
Editors:
Birgit Lugrin, University of Wurzburg,
Catherine Pelachaud, Sorbonne University,
David Traum, University of Southern California
ISBN: 9781450387217 | PDF ISBN: 9781450387231
Hardcover ISBN: 9781450387200
Copyright 2021 | 538 Pages
DOI: 10.1145/3477322
November 14, 2021
Our new handbook came out:
The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents: 20 years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics
The Volume 1: Methods, Behavior, Cognition, can be found in digital form:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3477322
and in printed version:
https://www.morganclaypoolpublishers.com/catalog_Orig/product_info.php?cPath=24&products_id=1670 (or on Amazon)
The ACM Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents 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, emotions, engagement, or even 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 2 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 by 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 or games.
Volume 2 of the Handbook is foreseen to appear soon.
Kind regards,
Birgit Lugrin, Catherine Pelachaud, David Traum