TY - GEN
T1 - Towards emotionally-intelligent pedagogical agents
AU - Zakharov, Konstantin
AU - Mitrovic, Antonija
AU - Johnston, Lucy
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Research shows that emotions play an important role in learning. Human tutors are capable of identifying and responding to the affective states of their students; therefore, for ITSs to be truly affective, they should also be capable of tracking and appropriately responding to the emotional state of their users. We report on a project aimed at developing an affect-aware pedagogical agent persona for an ITS for teaching database design skills. We use the dimensional approach to affective modeling, and track the users' affective state along the valence dimension as identified from tracking the users' facial features. We describe the facial-feature tracking application we developed, as well as the set of rules that control the agent's behavior. The agent's response to the student's action depends on the student's cognitive state (as determined from the session history) as well as on the student's affective state. The experimental study of the agent shows the general preference towards the affective agent over the non-affective agent.
AB - Research shows that emotions play an important role in learning. Human tutors are capable of identifying and responding to the affective states of their students; therefore, for ITSs to be truly affective, they should also be capable of tracking and appropriately responding to the emotional state of their users. We report on a project aimed at developing an affect-aware pedagogical agent persona for an ITS for teaching database design skills. We use the dimensional approach to affective modeling, and track the users' affective state along the valence dimension as identified from tracking the users' facial features. We describe the facial-feature tracking application we developed, as well as the set of rules that control the agent's behavior. The agent's response to the student's action depends on the student's cognitive state (as determined from the session history) as well as on the student's affective state. The experimental study of the agent shows the general preference towards the affective agent over the non-affective agent.
KW - Affect recognition
KW - Affective pedagogical agents
KW - Emotional intelligence
KW - Evaluation
KW - Facial feature tracking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70349881930&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-540-69132-7_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-540-69132-7_7
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:70349881930
SN - 9783540691303
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 19
EP - 28
BT - Intelligent Tutoring Systems - 9th International Conference, ITS 2008, Proceedings
A2 - Woolf, Beverley P.
A2 - Aïmeur, Esma
A2 - Nkambou, Roger
A2 - Lajoie, Susanne
PB - Springer
CY - Switzerland
T2 - 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS 2008
Y2 - 23 June 2008 through 27 June 2008
ER -