When Agents Become Partners: A Review of the Role the Implicit Plays in the Interaction with Artificial Social Agents

The way we interact with computers has significantly changed over recent decades. However, interaction with computers still falls behind human to human interaction in terms of seamlessness, effortlessness, and satisfaction. We argue that simultaneously using verbal, nonverbal, explicit, implicit, intentional, and unintentional communication channels addresses these three aspects of the interaction process. To better understand what has been done in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in terms of incorporating the type channels mentioned above, we reviewed the literature on implicit nonverbal interaction with a specific emphasis on the interaction between humans on the one side, and robot and virtual humans on the other side. These Artificial Social Agents (ASA) are increasingly used as advanced tools for solving not only physical but also social tasks. In the literature review, we identify domains of interaction between humans and artificial social agents that have shown exponential growth over the years. The review highlights the value of incorporating implicit interaction capabilities in Human Agent Interaction (HAI) which we believe will lead to satisfying human and artificial social agent team performance. We conclude the article by presenting a case study of a system that harnesses subtle nonverbal, implicit interaction to increase the state of relaxation in users. This “Virtual Human Breathing Relaxation System” works on the principle of physiological synchronisation between a human and a virtual, computer-generated human. The active entrainment concept behind the relaxation system is generic and can be applied to other human agent interaction domains of implicit physiology-based interaction.

Analysis of Single Buffer Random Polling System With State-Dependent Input Process and Server/Station Breakdowns

Models and analytical techniques are developed to evaluate the performance of two variations of single buffers (conventional and buffer relaxation system) multiple queues system. In the conventional system, each queue can have at most one customer at any time and newly arriving customers find the buffer full are lost. In the buffer relaxation system, the queue being served may have two customers, while each of the other queues may have at most one customer. Thomas Y.S. Lee developed a state-dependent non-linear model of uncertainty for analyzing a random polling system with server breakdown/repair, multi-phase service, correlated input processes, and single buffers. The state-dependent non-linear model of uncertainty introduced in this paper allows us to incorporate correlated arrival processes where the customer arrival rate depends on the location of the server and/or the server's mode of operation into the polling model. The author allows the possibility that the server is unreliable. Specifically, when the server visits a queue, Lee assumes that the system is subject to two types of failures: queue-dependent, and general. General failures are observed upon server arrival at a queue. But there are two possibilities that a queue-dependent breakdown (if occurs) can be observed; (i) is observed immediately when it occurs and (ii) is observed only at the end of the current service. In both cases, a repair process is initiated immediately after the queue-dependent breakdown is observed. The author's model allows the possibility of the server breakdowns/repair process to be non-stationary in the number of breakdowns/repairs to reflect that breakdowns/repairs or customer processing may be progressively easier or harder, or that they follow a more general learning curve. Thomas Y.S. Lee will show that his model encompasses a variety of examples. He was able to perform both transient and steady state analysis. The steady state analysis allows us to compute several performance measures including the average customer waiting time, loss probability, throughput and mean cycle time.