Title: Socially Adept Technologies
1Socially Adept Technologies
Steve Marsh National Research Council
Canada steve.marsh_at_nrc.ca http//www.stephenmarsh
.ca/ March 21st, 2002
2Motivation
- An introduction to the field
- Pointers to relevant work
- Questions about suitability
- Suggestions for future projects
- A wake-up call
- A call to arms
- Propaganda -)
3Outline
- Introduction
- What is Social Adeptness?
- What is a Socially Adept Technology?
- Examples of work in Social Adeptness
- Questions
- Problems
- Answers?
- Conclusions and more questions (from you? -)
4Heres a thought...
5Introductions
When an individual enters the presence of others,
they commonly seek to acquire information about
him or bring into play information about him
already possessed ... Information about the
individual helps to define the situation,
enabling others to know in advance what he will
expect of them and what they may expect of
him. GOFFMAN, E., page 13, 1959 The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin
Middlesex.
6So? What does this mean?
- Humans have a sense of self (Mead) and through
this they adapt to situations and decide how to
interact with others (by trying to figure out the
self of the other person) - Human-human interaction is social
- It is also cultural
- Our culture dictates what is and what is not
acceptable in given situations - Novel situations are handled by prior similar
situations if possible (cf scripts) - And there may be rules, implicit or explicit, we
follow...
7Fair enough, but so what? Were AI (agents?!)
people
- This ability to behave socially and culturally
correctly towards people (or entities) with whom
we are interacting is what we call social
adeptness - Whats en entity?
- People, animals, agents
- So what?
- So, we argue that if this social adeptness works
so well for humans, why shouldnt it work just as
well for machines? - (and were not the only ones, as youll see)
- So, in other words, human-human and human machine
and machine-machine interactions are social
8Social Adeptness
- One sensible definition of social adeptness
isThe ability to behave correctly in any
given situation according to the culture of the
agents with whom one is interacting in any social
setting. - And correctly means sensibly, carefully, and in
an expected manner (which is, granted, a slight
tautology)
9What is it, in a practical sense?
- Social adeptness is an understanding of,
reasoning about, and behaviour according to
social norms such as - Ethics
- Emotions
- Morality
- Trust
- Personality
- A sense of self
- A sense of others
- Cultural awareness
- Social awareness (which is often the same
thing) (Marsh, 1995)
10Socially Adept Technologies (or Agents)?
- A Socially Adept Technology is capable of
reasoning with these norms in order to determine
correct behaviour in any given interaction - The word interaction is important here
- Correct social behaviour may or may not be
necessary in private(Remember the tree falling
in an empty forest?) - But, interactions can be asynchronous (as with
email) - Basically, the onus is on us to behave correctly
toward those we are interacting with
11?
- It should be clear that, in order to allow
technologies (agents, interfaces, etc.) to reason
with these social norms, we need to have formal,
or at least computationally tractable, models of
them - Obtaining these models is the goal of research in
Social Adeptness - Interdisciplinary
- Wide ranging
- And hard -)
12Actually, its quite easy to imagine...
- Imagine
- Cellphones that dont ring when youre at the
theatre (or at a lecture) - Robotic vacuum cleaners that dont vacuum when
youre in the middle of a dinner party - or a good movie
- Interfaces that can adapt to your mood
- Tools that can help you interact with people from
different cultures, in various situations - Agents that organise meetings according to your
personal requirements - and all without ever having to be told what is
right - All of these are Socially Adept Technologies...
13 whilst quite hard to do
- Work in the field is inherently
multidisciplinary, ranging over topics such as - Philosophy
- Sociology
- Computer science
- AI
- Psychology
- etc...
14Work in Social Adeptness
- Several researchers are working in and around the
topic. To name some (and discuss fewer)... - Socially Intelligent Agents
- Dautenhahn (Hertfordshire, England)
- Artificial Morality
- Danielson (UBC)
- Trust
- Marsh, Dibben (St Andrews, Scotland), Davenport
(Napier, Scotland), Esfandiari, Chdrasekharan
(Carleton), Castelfranchi (NRC Italy) - Personality
- Meech (AmikaNow!), Reeves Nass (Stanford)
- Interface Agents
- Extempo (Hayes-Roth), Microsoft
15Socially Intelligent Agents
- Prinicipally, this is Kerstin Dautenhahns work
- Dautenhahn has organised several workshops in
this field, and a book is forthcoming - See her web pages for details
- The basic premise is similar to SATs
- Make systems that can interact properly with
humans - Robotics in fact play a large part in this work
- Dautenhahns web pages can be found
athttp//homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/comqkd/
16Artificial Morality
- Peter Danielson, UBC (see his book Artificial
Morality Virtuous Robots for Virtual Worlds,
Routledge, 1992) - Danielson provides simple agents with an
understanding of morality and its workings - He has extended his work in several very
interesting areas (including ecology and the
business world) - See his web pages athttp//www.ethics.ubc.ca/pad
/
17Trust
- (A topic dear to my heart!)
- Introduced for autonomous agents in 1991-2
(Marsh) - Trust is the basis of sociability
- Without trust, society would cease to exist (Bok)
- Thus, an understanding of and concrete
implementations of trust are vitally important to
the study of Social Adeptness, acting as the
keystone of a Socially Adept (or Intelligent)
Technological thrust - As evidence of its importance, it has received
more attention than most other SA attributes,
especially recently (because of E-Commerce, which
well come to sooner or later)
18Trust contd. - Other work
- The past 3 years have had workshops on Deception,
Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies organised at
the Autonomous Agents conferences - The proceedings from these workshops are an
invaluable aid to finding out more
19Personality
- An understanding of and subsequent representation
of personality is an important part of any
interaction - This applies to human-technology interactions
just as much as human-human - The most visible work in this area is that of
Reeves and Nass from Stanford, reported in their
book, The Media Equation - A significant result from this work was that
people like to interact with systems that show
the same personality as them - e.g., dominant with dominant, submissive with
submissive, etc.
20Personality contd. - Reeves and Nass
- The Media Equation presents compelling evidence
for this and other findings - Although subsequent work may have put this in
doubt - Quite simply however, people anthropomorphise
- They ascribe personalities to technology
- (do you talk to your car?)
- and because of this they find it easier to
interact with (and put up with) the technology - This is powerful stuff - understanding it gives
us a key to designing more acceptable systems and
interfaces
21Personality contd. - Meech
- Meech, for his thesis, looks into the Media
Equations results and takes them further into
the design of human-computer interfaces - The conclusions drawn are similar - that people
like to interact with like personalities - Such personalities can also be promoted, even in
textual interfaces, with different wording,
emphasis, etc. - We are using this work in a novel web site
architecture, as youll see later
22Time for a look back...
- There are many more examples of work in Social
Adeptness - Too many to cover in this talk, including
- Emergent behaviour (Artificial Life, studies of
societies) - Emotions (e.g. Roz Picards Affective Computing,
MIT) - Attention-based systems (e.g. Roel Vertegaal,
Queens U) - Narrative and communicative systems (Bickmore
Cassel, MIT Mateas and Sengers, CMU) - Systems that make jokes (Kim Binstead, Sony)
- etc.
- Bringing them together under a single moniker is
worthwhile and informative
23and forward, and ...
- Given what we have seen so far in the area, its
time to think about the ultimate goal (implicit
or explicit, worked towards or not) of this
combined researchThe creation of (potentially
physically) embodied social agents capable of
existing in the real human social world,
behaving correctly according to the norms of
society and culture. - Such agents may not be artificially intelligent,
but they will undoubtedly be socially intelligent - But were a way away from that yet
24 sideways
- Given the theoretical work, whats being done
practically?(Now we come to the promotional
part) - My work at NRC is specifically concerned with
Socially Adept Technology, its uses and how to
apply it to different avenues of work - This will proceed in a new lab, with the code
name Project Mole Rat -) - Ill discuss some of the relevant work here
25A Prolegomenon for all Future Social Technologies
Research
- (with apologies fo Immanuel Kant)
- I believe (and youre free to disagree)
- Technology should be seen as a social actor (cf.
Reeves and Nass) - Incorporation of social norms into technology can
result in increased user comfort and efficiency
(no second guessing) - Social norms can be incorporated both in the
interface between human and technology, but also - Within the technology itself
- In the interface between technologies
- Many of these beliefs stem from my focus on
Multi-Agent Systems (in itself a European
concept)
26Trust, contd. - Marsh
- My own work in trust was devoted towards
- Better understanding how cooperative trust worked
- Developing a computationally tractable
formalisation of Trust - Allowing for trust reasoning agents
- Allowing for social science studies involving
formal models of trust - Implementing and testing the model
- For in-depth details, see the website
27Formalising Trust?
- Some basic terminology
- Trusting entities have 3 kinds of trust
- Basic Tx
- The amount of trust you might have in the world
- General Tx(y)
- Trust you have in a specific person in general
- Situational Tx(y,a)
- Trust you have in a specific person in a specific
situation - Trust values are in the range -1,1) (now, is
that odd?)
28Formalising Trust?
- Formal models can be used to model trust through
interactions - Tx(y,a) Ux(a) Ix(a)
Tx(y) - Cooperation threshold
- C_Tx(y,a) (Rx(a) / Cx(y, a))
Ix(a) - Marsh(1994) see http// www.iit.nrc.ca/steve/pub
s/Trust
29But
- The models arent perfect
- They were never meant to be
- But they are simple
- And they do work (even with humans (Dibben,
1998)) - Were applying them to E-Commerce, as youll see
later
30ACORN
Portions of this work were carried out in
collaboration with researchers at University of
New Brunswicks Faculty of Computer Science
Thanks to Profs Ali Ghorbani and Virendra
Bhavsar in particular, who have taken ACORN from
its humble beginnings to new heights Students
and programmers that have worked on this project
are Youssef Masrour, Hui Yu, Leigh Wetmore, and
Jonathan Carter.
31ACORN - Introduction and Motivation
- ACORN is a tool-based SAT, whose relevance
becomes clearer with some thought - ACORN is a peer to peer multi-mobile-agent
architecture based on community-oriented
communication paths in human society - Stanley
Milgrams Small World Problem - (how many buzzwords do you need in a sentence?)
- ACORN was conceived as a replacement for static
information systems such as bog standard email
and static web servers - We see information in this sense as a dynamic
entity which has to work to exist in the world - ACORN is one of those acronyms Agent-based
Community Oriented Routing Network
32ACORN - Basics
- In ACORN, every piece of information is
(potentially represented by) an autonomous mobile
agent - the InfoAgent - sounds, images, movies, frames, documents and
parts of documents, files, links, and so on - Note - anything you can send via email, you can
send in ACORN too - Every InfoAgent carries with it
- metadada for and a link to its information (not
necessarily the information itself) - owner information (it is given)
- community information (it learns and can be
given) - community paths (it builds itself and can be
given)
33Uses of ACORN
- As an email replacement - email with attitude
- As community building and enhancing technology
- As a people finder
- As a novel peer review system
- As a personalised directed information
architecture - (directed ads, anyone...?)
- B2B and B2C applications
34Current Status
- ACORN is fully implemented in Java (uses JSP)
- There will be a port to C this summer
- Development is ongoing in privacy, anonymity, and
thin InfoAgents - Integration of summarisation and additional
search technologies are also ongoing
35Socially Adept Web Sites
- An application of SAT to adaptive web site
technology, this project aims to show how some
simple rules can be applied to already existing
technology in order to facilitate its better
usage and integration in society - Its also an approach to answering Etzionis
(1997) call for adaptive webs - Finally, although it is applied presently to
eCommerce and web interfaces, we believe some at
least of what weve learned can be applied to
other interfaces. - This work was carried out jointly with John
Meech. Our thanks also goes to Alaa Dabbour for
a first implementation of the prototype site
36Static Trust Factors in E-Commerce
- Seals of Approval
- Brand
- Navigation
- Fulfillment
- Presentation
- Technology
- Studio Archetype/Sapient
37Web Site As Agent
- Web site acts as an intelligent, adaptive
interface - can be viewed as an agent - Constructs a user profile from interactions,
history and other data - Uses models of trust, personality and context to
evaluate user behaviour - Adapts web page content/structure accordingly
- A prototype site has been developed for this
paradigm
38Web Site Architecture
39SociAware
- SociAware is Socially Aware technology - a
simple means of thinking realistically about SATs
in general. - It was first introduced at MICON in August 2001
- The most basic aspect of SociAware is the
extension of the trust model in simple ways to
enable social trust reasoning (that is, to allow
society to reason about how it trusts things
such as information.
40SociAware Applications infoDNA
- A standard of Trust in information agents,
implemented as an extension to the ACORN
architecture - Problem agents judging information in ACORN
- i.e., which pieces of information to forward to
owner, and which to discard - Solution each piece of information is socially
rated - Then each agent can use these ratings in decision
making - Note that this solution is not perfect
- Societies can be fooled into believing things
that are not true
41ACORN and infoDNA
- Each piece of information carries with it
additional infoDNA - Originator and signature
- Set of reader ratings and signatures
- Ratings in our system are -1,1) but any
suitable representation would work - Agents can judge information based on these
societal rankings - Naturally, much more information is also
available - Owner of information
- Metadata
- This is a simple application but worthwhile, also
it gives us a set of results to work with when
implementing more complex approaches
42Social Web Technology
- Socially Adept Web Site adapts to User
personality, trust - However, initial stages of adaptation are
problematic - Unknown user, unknown requirements
- Site strange to user
- Potential privacy concerns with adaptation, user
profile - Using SociAware technology, we will be addressing
these concerns
43Social Web Technology
- User represented by SociAware Agent
- This maintains user profile
- Site represented by Site Agent
- At first visit, negotiations between user and
site agents result in pre-built user profile with
no identifying capacity (except through user
agent, which reveals only what is necessary) - In addition, because SociAware, user agent can
query society (e.g. via SociAware server) for
views on site policies, etc. - SociaAware server maintains data. Also becomes
indispensable in browsing new unknown sites - Other value added - negotiation via SociAware
server preserves even more privacy/control
44Table Manners - a physical SAT
- For this implementation of the SAT concept, we
wanted to take some physical aspect of
collaborative technology and use it as a base
toolset with which to experiment on various
topics - Group formation in distributed settings
- The detection and facilitation of group dynamics
in local and distributed settings - The locus of command in a collaborative
technology - Remote control and tele-haptic technologies
- Computer Supported Collaborative Play
- For this, we chose to implement two HI-Space
tables over two sites in Ottawa (CRCs Virtual
Classroom and NRCs MoleRat lab), with an option
to network further tables - The umbrella name of this technology toolset is
Table Manners (thanks to Monica) - Were still building the tables - they will be
online by June
45(No Transcript)
46Architecture
- Table Manners will use agents to represent
individual users - Each user will then have a model the agent can
use to predict behaviour, analyse the same, and
come up with worthwhile group building/reinforcing
structures amongst the other users and their
agents - This raises interesting questions of privacy,
sensing, avatar potential, etc.
47Table Manners continued
- We will have
- 2 networked tables over a dedicated research
fibre for high bandwidth - 2 large plasma displays for video conferencing
- Palm pilot control and personalisation of table
and associated information - Wireless Haptic capabilities (prototypes based on
MindStorms stuff, with more to come) - Several potential projects to implement and
observe - (and Im very excited about the potentials!)
48Potential Table Research Approaches
- Remote control of robotics
- Agent based user modeling - truly socially adept
agents - Avatars
- Advanced video conferencing
- Active environments
- Collaborative gaming
- Privacy and trust
- Ubiquitous individual information handling
49The Wacky Idea File
- Wouldnt it be nice if
- Your PDA could guide you in real time about the
customs and social expectations of the new
country youve just arrived in - Your PDA could link with an active environment
and show you how what you see now relates to what
you saw (perhaps in another country) last week - Wireless was so ubiquitous you really were always
wired, and your machines were always contextually
and socially aware - Your machines really were invisible, really
were personal and really did know what do do
at any given time - We really could trust our technology to do the
right thing - Technology simply faded away when you didnt need
it
50Questions
- Work on Socially Adept Technologies raises its
own questions - Ironically, of ethics and morality amongst others
- Some of them I mention briefly here, others may
be plain to you - Is this a good thing to do?
- Are we hurting people by deceiving them?
- Is anthropomorphising technology good for people?
- Can bad people use this in naughty ways? How?
- What does this give us regular AI (or even dumb)
technologies dont? - Do we need Artificial Intelligence if we have
Social Intelligence? - Where is all this going?
51Problems
- The main concern with all of this work is that it
may indeed not be possible - Is it, for example, possible to provide a good
enough representation of Trust for artificial
agents? What about emotion? - And given this, does the agent really trust or
emote, for example? - All of which raises interesting philosophical
questions, if nothing else - And which I leave in your capable hands but...
52Some Answers?
- The obvious answer to the questions and problems
raised is to ignore them and hope they go away - (This is not a particularly scientific, or moral,
approach) - The most powerful answer is that, by researching
these topics and by asking these questions at the
same time, we are doing two very powerful things - Attempting to use what we find to achieve some
answers - Asking the questions (another tautology?!)
- As scientists, we have a responsibility for
asking these questions before others do the work
without asking them, and who knows, we might just
find some answers...
53Conclusions
- Socially Adept Technologies relates to two
distinct things - Technologies capable of behaving properly in the
social world - A collection of research topics relating to the
concept of social behaviour - There are several other parts of the puzzle out
there - Socially Adept Technologies can provide for
novel, worthwhile, and above all, satisfying
models of user-machine interaction - In addition, understanding and modeling social
behaviour may lead to a better understanding of
and support systems for human societal behaviour
(cf. Dibben, 1998) - Finally, looking at this topic raises interesting
moral and ethical questions which will not go
away, and which it is our responsibility to
address
54A final word
- Without systems being able to sense that the user
is there, who they are, what theyre doing or
need, and lots of other physical and mental
things, this stuff is doomed to ultimate failure - (consider the average traffic light)
- The human in the loop is the key to Social
Adeptness...
55Thanks for listening