Toward Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user's social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are presented through a conceptual architecture centered on two key ideas: 1) conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of general situation awareness, and 2) using situation taxonomies for such instantiation. This enables support agents to represent a user's social situation, comprehend its meaning, and assess its impact on the user's behavior. We discuss empirical results supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach and illustrate howthe architecture can be used in support agents through two use cases.

Automated summary

Researchers analyze the problem of developing support agents that can perceive social situations and propose a conceptual architecture to achieve this social situation awareness. By conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of general situation awareness and using situation taxonomies for implementation, support agents are able to better understand a user's social situation and its impact on their behavior.