Group Counseling Agent

The group counseling agent is my master project at the School of Computer Science, Northeastern University. I worked under the mentorship of Professor Timothy Bickmore, Ph. D. at the Relational Agents Group. The goal of the project is to design, implement and evaluate an animated conversational agent that functions in the role of a group facilitator for health behavior change counseling. The project was one of the finalists at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) - Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA).

In this project, we are trying to develop an agent that can interact with multiple users at the same time. To interact with the users, the agent uses synthetic speech and synchronized animation. The users use an RF input devices from Audio Response System to interact with the agent. Possible user responses are displayed on the right side of the agent. The agent is programmed with the name and the users’ seat location. [1]

To understand how group counseling works, we conducted literature reviews on group counseling and analyzed an actual group counseling videos. We implemented some of the group counseling techniques that we found during literature review process, such as: round, mini-lecturing and drawing-out members. To do that, we have designed three modes of interaction: 1) ALL RESPONSES. In this mode, all users must give responses; 2) ONE RESPONSE. In this mode, the agent asks question to a particular user; and 3) VOLUNTEER RESPONSE, where a user can share information to the group. The agent will wait until it received notification that the user has finished talking. [1]

Subsequently, we conducted a pilot study with two groups of user discussing exercise behavior change led by the agents. “Participants gave the agent generally positive ratings, with average ratings of 5 out of 7 for its ability to promote group interaction and its effectiveness at running the meeting.” [1]

References

[1] Dina Utami and Timothy Bickmore. “Interaction between a Conversational Agent and Multiple Users: A Group Counseling Agent.” Turning Technologies. Web. 11/30/2011. http://www.turningtechnologies.com/media/files/Northeastern.pdf