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purplecatI've just got back from the AISB Convention in Aberdeen. I'm just about up-to-date on reading email and LJ but a long way behind in terms of responding. There are also lots of things I want to blog about including several really interesting talks. I was going to do one big "interesting talks" post but that was intimidating so I thought I'd do lots of short ones.
The first is Justine Cassell's talk on Virtual Peers for Studying and Scaffolding Real Social Interaction. Justine had studied interaction, specifically storytelling, in children and created a "Virtual Peer" which would then interact with a child. This interaction was via a doll's house (half real half virtual). Certain parts of the Doll's House were covered and a child would put a doll behind one of these covers to let the virtual child use it (apparently only AI researchers try to break this mechanism and have one doll in two places). The working of the Virtual Peer involves Justine sitting in a cupboard with a control panel directing its actions and responses. One of the really interesting bits was when they extended this work to autistic children and compared their interactions with the Virtual Peer to their interactions with a real child. The autistic child responded more often and participated more in the joint story-telling when interacting with the Virtual Peer than with a real child - they have some hypotheses why this might be (some of which are testable and some of which aren't - or at least they can't think how yet). They are extending the work to allow children to construct and operate the control panel themselves and are hoping this will enable autistic children to "experiment" with social interaction.
The first is Justine Cassell's talk on Virtual Peers for Studying and Scaffolding Real Social Interaction. Justine had studied interaction, specifically storytelling, in children and created a "Virtual Peer" which would then interact with a child. This interaction was via a doll's house (half real half virtual). Certain parts of the Doll's House were covered and a child would put a doll behind one of these covers to let the virtual child use it (apparently only AI researchers try to break this mechanism and have one doll in two places). The working of the Virtual Peer involves Justine sitting in a cupboard with a control panel directing its actions and responses. One of the really interesting bits was when they extended this work to autistic children and compared their interactions with the Virtual Peer to their interactions with a real child. The autistic child responded more often and participated more in the joint story-telling when interacting with the Virtual Peer than with a real child - they have some hypotheses why this might be (some of which are testable and some of which aren't - or at least they can't think how yet). They are extending the work to allow children to construct and operate the control panel themselves and are hoping this will enable autistic children to "experiment" with social interaction.