A Space Resonating with Being is a visual-audio interactive artwork where the visual art on a 55-inch display changes in response to external intervention, focusing on experiencing the space as a living organism. The real-time visual effects that appear on the display reflect the local natural environment when there is no viewer interaction, symbolically integrating the natural environment into a space. When the viewer interacts with the artwork, it is transformed by an algorithm based on physiological signals from the viewer. The artwork changes based on their biorhythms, such as their breathing and heart rate, and they enjoy a unique experience where the art space responds to them, providing a dynamic and colorful visual-audio experience. The artwork draws attention to the impact of the viewer on space and how artwork affects the viewer’s internal world perception through the experience of the artwork gradually morphing to resonate with them.

Electrification is an important first step toward reducing the greenhouse emissions of passenger vehicles. However, how drivers drive, charge, and operate their electrified vehicles can have a large impact on their emissions, particularly for Plug-in Hybrid Electric vehicles (PHEVs) that combine all-electric driving with an internal combustion engine. In this paper, we investigate how and why drivers use their PHEVs and uncover design opportunities for interfaces that can support the efficient use of PHEVs. We used a mixed-method approach combining quantitative, qualitative, and concept elicitation methods with PHEV owners in the US. While past findings indicate that PHEV drivers are not motivated to charge regularly, our work contradicts this with evidence of (1) regular charging with home infrastructure, (2) high cost sensitivity, and (3) preference for driving in all-electric mode. Our results indicate that the most critical problem is inadequate user support for navigating poor charging infrastructure.

Public speaking is important in the sciences, but poor quality presentations are common, as are high rates of public speaking anxiety. In this work we explore the use of a mobile humanoid robot as a co-presenter that can share the stage with a scientist giving an oral presentation. We conducted a within-subjects experiment comparing presentations given with and without the robot and impacts on public speaking anxiety and speaker confidence. We found that participants reported significantly greater confidence and lower public speaking anxiety when co-presenting with the robot, compared to when they presented on their own, without the robot. Audiences accepted scientific presentations given with the robot, rating these presen-tations significantly greater than neutral on presentation quality.

Job advertisements in white male-dominated organizations are often biased in ways that discourage female and minority candidates from applying. We explored the use of a female African American virtual agent who provides a first-person reaction to a biased job advertisement, providing an impassioned, vivid description of her feelings about the advertisement, the position, and the organization offering the job, and how the position---as described---would impact her life were she to take the job. We evaluate the impact interactions with this agent have on the effort study participants invest in editing the job advertisement following their interaction with the agent, compared to reading a page of standard educational text on diversity in hiring. Participants who interacted with the agent spent significantly more effort correcting the job ad, as measured both by the number of edit operations and the number of biased phrases removed, compared to participants in the control condition. Implications and a future research agenda for increasing diversity using virtual agents are presented.

Churches play a major role in providing social support to address health inequities within Black communities, in part by connecting members to key organizations and services. While public health has a history of disseminating interventions in faith communities, little work has explored the use of crowdsourcing to tailor interventions to the unique culture of each church community. Following Community Based Participatory Research principles, we partnered with two predominantly Black churches, and report on a series of three participatory design sessions with nine participants. We developed a novel storyboarding method to explore how crowdsourcing could promote health in these faith-based communities. Our findings characterize existing supports within the church community, and how church social structures impact member access to these supports. We further identify motivations to engage with a church-situated health application, and how these motivations translate to crowdsourcing tasks. Finally, we discuss considerations for public health crowdsourcing tasks.

Audience perceptions of public speakers' performance change over time. Some speakers start strong but quickly transition to mundane delivery, while others may have a few impactful and engaging portions of their talk preceded and followed by more pedestrian delivery. In this work, we model the time-varying qualities of a presentation as perceived by the audience and use these models both to provide diagnostic information to presenters and to improve the quality of automated performance assessments. In particular, we use HMMs to model various dimensions of perceived quality and how they change over time and use the sequence of quality states to improve feedback and predictions. We evaluate this approach on a corpus of 74 presentations given in a controlled environment. Multimodal features-spanning acoustic qualities, speech disfluencies, and nonverbal behavior were derived both automatically and manually using crowdsourcing. Ground truth on audience perceptions was obtained using judge ratings on both overall presentations (aggregate) and portions of presentations segmented by topic. We distilled the overall presentation quality into states representing the presenter's gaze, audio, gesture, audience interaction, and proxemic behaviors. We demonstrate that an HMM of state-based representation of presentations improves the performance assessments.

Culturally informed design for virtual agents has been shown to positively impact health outcomes when tailored to target audiences. We present a participatory design methodology for culturally tailoring virtual agents. Investigators worked with key informants from our target population, members of predominantly Black church communities, to design culturally-relevant and sensitive virtual agent health promotion interventions. In the first participatory session, key informants designed agents to assist them with different aspects of their lives, providing input on agent appearance and agent functionality. In a second design session, participants re-wrote the content of a health conversation with an agent, to include personally-relevant content related to their community (e.g., religious and scriptural references). We report design principles for religious tailoring derived from these studies. We conducted a validation study to assess the effects of applying these principles to agents that promoted two health behaviors, finding that participants responded very positively to the tailored agents.

Public speaking is an essential task for success in many careers, yet fear of public speaking makes this an undesirable activity for most people and negatively affects the quality of many presentations. Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective tool for helping people overcome social anxieties disorders, including public speaking anxiety. However, most people do not engage in this therapy for public speaking anxiety, due to time constraints and other barriers. We present a virtual coach that uses cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help presenters restructure irrational thoughts associated with public speaking anxiety. The design of the virtual coach was informed by an analysis of a corpus of cognitive restructuring examples generated by a clinical psychologist. In a between-subjects experiment comparing the virtual coach to a control condition, the virtual coach was shown to be significantly better at reducing thoughts associated with speech anxiety and improving a presentation experience for speakers.

Conversational agents have the potential to support users in many tasks. However, support for productivity and well-being in the workplace has received little attention. We present the first design of a conversational system that supports information workers with multiple work-related goals, informed by a survey of the current and potential use of conversational agents in the workplace. The goals of this research include the evaluation of using an agent for scheduling and prioritizing tasks, switching tasks, providing break reminders, dealing with social media distractions and for end of the day reflection on tasks accomplished. We deployed a chat-based intelligent agent, named Amber, in a field study with 24 information workers over the course of 6 days. We present our preliminary findings from the field study and discuss implications for the design of future workplace conversational agents.

Oral presentations are important and challenging tasks that most people struggle with due to public speaking anxiety. Virtual agents have been shown to be effective communication skills training coaches and effective as virtual audiences for inducing anxiety in public speaking exposure therapy. To date, there are fewer research interventions, including virtual agents, that are designed to assist presenters manage their anxiety in real-time during presentations. Our research attempts to fill this gap by exploring ways in which technologies, including virtual agents, can help reduce anxiety during presentations. To help presenters manage their anxiety, we will design and evaluate an automated real-time framework for detecting public speaking anxiety and explore behavioral just-in-time techniques that presenters can use while presenting. Our automated framework will be guided by a physiological detection model, use a virtual agent as the user interface, and will assist presenters during their presentation.

Our research explores the development of new interaction formats for oral presentations that leverage a life-sized virtual agent that co-delivers a scientific talk with a human presenter. We developed a taxonomy of 36 novel interaction formats as well as 37 roles the agent can take on in co-presentations. We evaluated the impact of these formats and roles by selecting 10 from the taxonomy and recording brief presentations on the same topic using the different formats. Judges ranked dynamic agent roles higher on engagement and rated non-standard interaction formats no lower on appropriateness, compared to standard turn-taking co-presentations.

When deployed on mobile devices, virtual agents have the potential to deliver advice regarding medical conditions, as well as provide a ubiquitous channel for health education and behavior change for a variety of chronic health conditions. We describe design guidelines for mobile agent dialogues to support chronic disease management, a general-purpose smartphone-based architecture for a conversational virtual agent that simulates face-to-face health counseling conversations with patients, and an initial agent implementation that provides counseling to patients with the chronic heart condition atrial fibrillation in conjunction with a mobile heart rhythm monitor that is attached to the back of the phone. Preliminary results from a randomized trial with 120 patients with atrial fibrillation indicate that the agent results in significant improvements in self-reported quality of life relative to a standard of care control group.

Longitudinal agent-based interventions only work if people continue using them on a regular basis, thus identifying users who are at risk of disengaging from these applications is important for retention and efficacy. We develop machine learning models that predict long-term user engagement in three longitudinal virtual agent-based health interventions. We achieve accuracies of 74% to 90% in predicting user dropout in a given prediction period of the intervention based on the user's past interactions with the agent. Our models contain features related to session frequency and duration, health behavior, and user-agent dialogue content. We find that the features most predictive of dropout include number of user utterances, percent of user utterances that are questions, and the percent of user health behavior goals met during the observation period. Ramifications for the design of virtual agents for longitudinal applications are discussed.