Training Adapted Personalised Affective Social Skills with Cultural Virtual Agents – TAPAS

The objectives of the project, in term of modeling, implementation and evaluation, to be reached at mid-term and final-term are:
(1) Objective to be achieved in the middle of the research period
- Collect corpora: humans presenting in front of other human(s) (ethical committee; user’s agreement); neurotypical users and users with difficulties in social interactions including participants with ASD
- Define the structure and content of the training sessions (e.g. sequence of exercises with progressive difficulty which are adapted and personalised to user’s social skills profile)
- Develop the interaction model and software platform for one to one SST, in one scenario (basic social skills, either listen or talk): work with one virtual agent and present to it (“present-alone” situation)
- Test system on neurotypical users
(2) Objective to be achieved at the end of the research period
- Develop one to many SST, in situations “work-multi-peers” and “present-multi-peers“ and the identified relevant skills (conversation skills: emotion management, turn-taking, mutual grounding): work with several virtual agents and present with them to a virtual audience
- Adapt the dynamic difficulty level during training session to user’s performance
- Test system including users with ASD
- Collect corpora: human-virtual agents (for children with ASD: hide their face, speech)

au 31 Mai 2021:
Amélioration de la plateforme Greta (ISIR)

Prise en main de la plateforme Greta par le groupe de Pr Nakamura.

Choix d’un cadre théorique basé sur les compétences sociales, les aptitudes sociales, les différences individuelles, et les situations de Résolution Collaboratives de Problème.

Définition d’un scénario et d’un protocole expérimental pour le recueil de données d’interaction humain-humain.

Définition et pré-test d’un protocole permettant d’évaluer l’impact des différences individuelles sur les compétences et aptitudes sociales lors de tâches de Résolution Collaborative de Problème (LISN / ISIR).

The outcome of this project will be severalfold. It can be used to produce applications for virtual training anytime and anywhere. We can foresee iOS/Android application distribution for example. It can also be used to conduct experiments in larger scale to validate the results. One can also imagine the developed platform can be adapted to other cultures.

organisation d'un workshop lié à la conférence ICMI'2020
2 publications à WACAI'2020

The project proposal TAPAS is targeted to develop tools and methods for Social Skill Training (SST) for a large variety of population. Social skills refer to managing verbal and nonverbal behaviors during an interaction with one or more persons. People facing difficulties interacting with others suffer from using appropriately their social behaviors and interpreting them in others. SST is used by therapists to train people to practice social interaction and overcome their social fear. It relies on role play as a means to put participants in a controlled social situation.

TAPAS will develop tools and methods for SST to provide personalised training of social skills and help overcome social stress in such everyday situations involving (joint) presentation at school and at work. Our aim is to develop a platform allowing participants to role play social interactions. The targeted population is neurotypical individuals but also individuals with different scales of social pathologies including shyness, alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We will inspire the design of the platform from two mainstreams methods for social skills training: Conventional SST and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

In TAPAS, Embodied Conversational Agents will be endowed with different roles: they will act either as co-workers, co-presenters or be part of an audience depending on the scenario. They will be designed to be autonomous entities able to interact with human participants. They will be able to display a wide range of nonverbal behaviors, handle a dialog but also adapt to participants’ behaviors.. Furthermore, the objective and difficulty of social interaction will be adapted to different users displaying different levels of social interaction capabilities.