When people collaborate face-to-face, they exchange a stream of nonverbal signals that support the conversation process. Many of these signals get lost or distorted when conversations move online, resulting in impoverished or even broken communication. In this talk I will introduce my work on personal conversational agents (PCAs). These are remote animated agents, or avatars, that act on the user's behalf to overcome deficiencies in the communication channel during online interaction. The PCAs can automatically produce supporting nonverbal signals, such as gaze, gesture and posture, from a model of face-to-face conversation and an analysis of the ongoing discourse. I will describe a general approach to developing PCAs as well an application within a collaborative virtual environment. I will report on a study that shows how PCAs improve people´s perception of each other and the task they are performing together.

Thursday, March 6, 2003
Moore School Bldg. - Room #216
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.