UCLIC Seminar: Empathy in Virtual Agents and Robots

Speaker: Prof. Ana Paiva, Technical Institute of Lisbon and INESC-ID, Portugal
UCL Contact: Louise Gaynor (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 25 Jan 12, 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: R 233 Foster Court

Abstract

Empathy is often seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This notion is often seen as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating virtual agents, that are believable and able to engage with users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. Indeed, for the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user's emotions, but also to adapt to them, and react in an empathic way.
This talk will provide an overview of this new challenging area of research, by analyzing empathy in the social relations established between humans and virtual agents or social robots. To illustrate these notions, we will providing a concrete model for the creation of empathic agents with some examples of both virtual agents and social robots.