Birgit Lugrin, University of Wurzburg,Catherine Pelachaud, Sorbonne University,David Traum, University of Southern CaliforniaISBN: 9781450398947 | PDF ISBN: 9781450398978Hardcover ISBN: 9781450398961Copyright © 2023 | 710 PagesDOI: 10.1145/3563659Many institutions worldwide provide digital library access to Morgan & Claypool titles. You can check for personal access by clicking on the DOI link.
The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents; Intelligent Virtual Agents; and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs); whether virtually or physically embodied; are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents; reason; decide how to interact; and express attitudes such as emotions; engagement; or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors; with the goal to support humans in various domains.Written by international experts in their respective fields; the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs; while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students; and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved.In two volumes; the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research; in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior; focusing on multimodality. Finally; social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction; examined from different angles such as interaction in social space; group interaction; or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education; aging support; autism; and games.