Achieving Task and Social Goals in Human-Computer Conversation with students
The objective of this project is to build embodied conversational agents (also known as ECAs, or virtual humans, or chatbots, or multimodal dialogue systems) that have the ability to engage their users in both social and task talk, where the social talk serves to improve task performance. In order to achieve this objective, we model human-human conversation, and integrate the models into ECAs, and then evaluate their performance. This position is a 3-4 year doctoral contract.
Mission
The PhD student chosen for this project should have a broad range of skills including at least several of the following:
- Experience with analysis of human-human conversational behavior, as the team relies on human behavior as the basis for the implementation of conversational agents. A plus would be experience in gathering and constructing corpora as the team routinely gathers and annotates data on the interaction between social and task aspects of human-human conversation.
- Experience building statistical and computational models of human data, particularly conversational data, based both on our own analyses and on relevant prior literature, using tools such as structural equation modeling, as well as neural network-based approaches..
- Experience with implementing and managing functioning embodied conversational agents, social robots or spoken dialogue systems.
For further information about the proposed research subject:
For more information on the project, potential candidates should look at the SARA (Socially-Aware Robot Assistant) website and RAPT (Rapport-Aligned Peer Tutor) projects at <http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/projects/> and read some of the publications associated with the project, here <http://articulab.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/publications/>
Main activities :
- Build models of human behavior
- Design and carry out experiments
- Analyze their results
- Write articles & present work in conferences
- Improve the existing pipeline of the conversational agent
Additional activities :
- Help to manage research team
- Prepare demos for conferences and visitors
In order to apply for this PhD student position, please upload into JobIn the following:
- An up-to-date CV
A letter of motivation describing your experience and interests
The names amd contact information of 3 people who can write recommendations for you (please note that letters of recommendation will not be accepted – only names of recommenders that we will contact).