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2020 | Book

What Is Character Computing? Read chapter Read first chapter

Character Computing

Editors: Alia El Bolock, Yomna Abdelrahman, Prof. Dr. Slim Abdennadher

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Human–Computer Interaction Series

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing, introduced by Alia El Bolock.

The latest scientific findings indicate that “One size DOES NOT fit all” in terms of how to design interactive systems and predict behavior to tailor the interaction experience. Emotions are one of the essential factors that influence people’s daily experiences; they influence decision making and how different emotions are interpreted by different individuals. For example, some people may perform better under stress and others may break.

Building upon Rosalind Picard’s vision, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions and how different characters perceive and react to these emotions, hence having richer and truly tailored interaction experiences.

Psychological processes or personality traits are embedded in the existing fields of Affective and Personality Computing. However, this book is the first that systematically addresses this including the whole human character; namely our stable personality traits, our variable affective, cognitive and motivational states as well as our morals, beliefs and socio-cultural embedding. The book gives an introduction into the theory and practice of the transdisciplinary field of Character Computing. The emerging field leverages Computer Science and Psychology to extend technology to include the whole character of humans and thus paves the way for researchers to truly place humans at the center of any technological development.

Character Computing is presented from three main perspectives:

● Profiling and sensing the character

● Leveraging characters to build ubiquitous character-aware systems

● Investigating how to extend Artificial Intelligence to create artificial characters

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. What Is Character Computing?
Abstract
In this chapter, Character Computing is introduced and defined. To do so, character itself is defined as all components that determine human behavior in a specific situation. It consists of general, stable factors (e.g., personality and sociocultural embeddings) and current factors (e.g., affect, mood, physical state, appearance, and cognitive state). Accordingly, Character Computing is all research on the Character–Behavior–Situation triad which gives insight into the interaction of the three components and how to model said interactions. Character Computing consists of three research modules: sensing the character, adapting to the character, and developing artificial characters. Most existing research toward any of these modules focuses on one aspect such as affect or personality and only takes the perspective of one discipline such as Psychology or Computer Science. Character Computing proposes addressing these questions from a joint perspective of Computer Science and Psychology while focusing on all relevant aspects making up a human being. The aim is providing an interdisciplinary, application-specific framework of human behavior in a specific situation given the human’s character.
Alia El Bolock
Chapter 2. An Experimental-Psychological Approach for the Development of Character Computing
Abstract
Progress in the field of computer science is paving ways for collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data from people from all over the globe almost in any situation be it at home or at work. Data collection and analysis may include the overt behavior of the user but may also explore the hidden affective, motivational and cognitive human factors. Making reliable predictions about human behavior thus means to take overt behavior as well as implicit human factors into consideration. Psychologically speaking, this means to explore the user’s whole character—his/her personality traits, his/her current cognitive, affective, and motivational states as well as the user’s cultural and social embedding—to best predict behavior in accordance with the user’s individual needs, preferences, and subjective well-being. This raises questions of how Character Computing as a novel and holistic approach of human behavior computing can be achieved without violating ethical standards and the user’s privacy. This introductory chapter will provide answers to these questions. In the first part of the chapter, it will be discussed how psychological theories of human behavior have inspired the fields of Cognitive Computing, Affective Computing, and Personality Computing. Next, a holistic psychological definition of human behavior will be provided that describes human behavior in the context of the Character–Behavior–Situation triad. It will be discussed how psychological understanding of human behavior can guide and improve future research in the domain of Character Computing. Finally, an experimental-psychological framework for Character Computing will be discussed that considers Character Computing from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Cornelia Herbert
Chapter 3. A Psychologically Driven, User-Centered Approach to Character Modeling
Abstract
Character Computing is a novel and interdisciplinary field of research based on interactive research between Computer Science and Psychology. To allow appropriate recognition and prediction of human behavior, Character Computing needs to be grounded on psychological definitions of human behavior that consider explicit as well as implicit human factors. The framework that guides Character Computing therefore needs to be of considerable complexity in order to capture the human user’s behavior in its entirety. The question to answer in this chapter is how Character Computing can be empirically realized and validated. The psychologically driven interdisciplinary framework for Character Computing will be outlined and how it is realized empirically as Character Computing platform. Special focus in this chapter is laid on experimental validation of the Character Computing approach including concrete laboratory experiments. The chapter adds to the former chapter which discussed the different steps of the Character Computing framework more broadly with respect to current theories and trends in Psychology and Behavior Computing.
Cornelia Herbert, Alia El Bolock, Slim Abdennadher
Chapter 4. Applications of Character Computing From Psychology to Computer Science
Abstract
The integration of Psychology and Computer Science research is one of the main focus points of research into Character Computing. Each field can help further Character Computing and only together can a usable framework for Character Computing be reached. This is done through combining experimental, computational and data-driven approaches. Research into Character Computing can be clustered into three main research modules. (1) Character sensing and profiling through implicit or explicit means while maintaining privacy and security measures. (2) Developing ubiquitous adaptive systems by leveraging character for specific use cases. (3) investigating artificial characters, how they could be achieved and when they should be implemented. This chapter discusses the challenges, opportunities, and possible applications of each module.
Alia El Bolock, Slim Abdennadher, Cornelia Herbert
Chapter 5. Character Computing and HCI
Abstract
Personalization plays an important role in human–computer interaction. A vast body of work has been directed into establishing research fields aiming to provide adaptive and personalized experience, e.g., Affective Computing and Adaptive Systems. However, current digital systems are largely blind to users’ character and traits. Systems that adapt to users’ character show great potential for augmenting character and for creating novel user experiences. This chapter presents possible indicators of users’ character from the HCI literature, discussing possibilities of recognizing and expressing character. Additionally, this chapter gives insights about potential application domains that might benefit from Character Computing as an emerging field. Lastly, this chapter discusses potential concerns, being as any fields, while Character Computing might open up interaction opportunities, it raises concerns from the various perspective from interaction concerns to privacy and ethical concerns.
Yomna Abdelrahman
Chapter 6. Affective Computing Needs Personalization—And a Character?
Abstract
The role of emotion and personality is described from several aspects reflecting the current state of the art. First, a general idea of emotion, mood, and personality with their basic theories as well as psychological and computational aspects is discussed. Furthermore, the human interaction with an emotional machine is described. In this scenario, the machine shows signs of emotion and augments the communication with the user by that. Another aspect of affective systems deals with the assessment of human emotion by a computer system. Apart from computer vision, wearable computing, social media, and virtual reality provide data that is used to learn about the emotional state and personality of an interaction partner. This leads to the model of a complete character rather than a system, which just reflects short-term affective reactions to events and perceptions. Part of this character is the personality, but also the personal interaction history, which in turn contributes to habits and environment knowledge which all in all explain the behavior. A further aspect deals with emotion and autonomy. In this scenario, emotion is part of a model, which is used to control an autonomous system. Eventually, application scenarios for emotion-based systems are discussed. Every section deals with emotion as well as with the current state of integrating personality models.
Dirk Reichardt
Chapter 7. Character-IoT (CIoT): Toward Human-Centered Ubiquitous Computing
Abstract
Character Computing envisions systems that can detect, synthesize, and adapt to human character. The development and realization of this field hinge upon the availability of data about human character traits and states. This data must be comprehensive enough to model the embedded causality in the triad of behavior–situation–character that makes up the core of Character Computing. Acquiring this data requires an intelligent and scalable platform for sensing, processing, analysis, and decision support, which we label as Character-IoT (CIoT). This chapter investigates how this CIoT can be realized. A comprehensive study of sensing modalities in the areas of affective and personality computing is presented to identify the technologies that can be adopted in Character Computing. This includes facial expressions, speech, text, gestures, and others. We also highlight artificial intelligence techniques that are most commonly used in areas of affective and personality computing and analyze which ones are suitable for Character Computing. Finally, we propose an architectural framework for CIoT that can be adopted by future researchers in this field.
Amr El Mougy
Chapter 8. Identifying Personality Dimensions for Characters of Digital Agents
Abstract
More and more digital services rely on natural “speech-first” user interfaces. With this trend arriving across industries, character design for digital assistants becomes relevant and along with it arises the fundamental problem of finding suitable personality dimensions. Classic personality models, like the Big Five Inventory or the Myers–Briggs-Type Indicator (MBTI), contain too many dimensions to be practicable foundations for many design use cases. This chapter introduces a method to distill use case-specific personality features from user interactions with broadly diverse characters. In particular, users converse with characters inspired from popular media figures and rate their personalities as well as their user experience and fit to a certain task. As one use case, we demonstrate how fixed parameters and major dimensions for dynamic assistant personalities in an in-car environment can be identified. The method can be used to find out use case-dependent requirements to an assistant personality as well as dynamically customizable character features for personalization purposes.
Michael Braun, Florian Alt
Chapter 9. The Good, the Bad, and the Rational: Aspects of Character in Logical Agents
Abstract
Common wisdom holds that each person has a character which is a rather stable, but revisable, system of conditional beliefs and preferences that causally directs the person’s behavior. Can the same be said of an artificial agent? In particular, does it make sense to talk of (the typically cold) logical agents, studied in logic-based artificial intelligence, as having characters? I argue that the answer is certainly “yes”, at least in the trivial sense that behaviors of such agents are directed by stable, yet revisable, systems of beliefs and preferences. What is interesting is investigating whether and how nontrivial variations in character, as exhibited by humans, can be witnessed in artificial logical agents. In this paper, I present an algebraic logical language which is expressive enough to facilitate the identification of a number of dimensions along which characters of logical agents may vary in interesting ways. Chief among these dimensions are high-level properties of belief and intention, and general constraints on the logic of good and bad.
Haythem O. Ismail
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Character Computing
Editors
Alia El Bolock
Yomna Abdelrahman
Prof. Dr. Slim Abdennadher
Copyright Year
2020
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-15954-2
Print ISBN
978-3-030-15953-5
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15954-2