web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/phd/cellularsquirrel -> web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/phd/cellularsquirrel/
Current mobile communication devices do not grab our attention in a socially appropriate way. They could be disrespectful of ongoing social activity such as an important meeting or private dinn er. To improve on this, I have built the Cellular Squirrel, a system whe re the agent that controls my cellphone is embodied in a small portable animatronic device, as a personal 'companion' for the user. This embodim ent is able to use the same subtle but still public non-verbal cues to g et our attention and interrupt us like humans would do (like eye gaze an d small gestures), instead of ringing or vibration. The user can whisper and listen to her squirrel, receiving and replying to voice instant mes sages. If the user wishes, she can also bypass the Intermediary altogeth er and get into a synchronous voice communication with the caller by sim ply talking to the embodiment.
Squirrel with back open Today's cellphones are passive communication portals. They do not 'care' about our ongoing conversations, about the relationship between the call er and the user, nor what the purpose of the call is, and often interrup t us at inappropriate times. The Cellular Squirrel is part of a larger p roject that aims at adding elements of human style social intelligence t o our mobile communication devices in order to make them more socially a cceptable to both user and local others.
Autonomous Interact ive Intermediary that assumes the role of an actively mediating party be tween caller, callee, and co-located people. This project explores ways to make mobile communication devices socially intelligent, both in their internal reasoning and in how they interact w ith people, trying to avoid, eg, that our advanced communication devic es interrupt us at completely inappropriate times. The Intermediary is a conversational as well as robotic agent. The conversational agent is able to converse with caller and calleeat th e same time, mediating between them, and possibly suggesting modality cr ossovers. It deals with incoming communication attempts when the user ca nnot or does not want to. It's a dual conversational agent since it can converse with both user and caller simultaneously, mediating between the m The robotic agent, an animatronic device, uses socially strong non-verbal cues like gaze, posture, and gestures, to alert and interact with the u ser and co-located people in a subtle but public way. I have built three working prototypes of Intermediaries: a parrot, a bunny, and a squirrel . An Intermediary, however, is more than just an interactive animatronic de vice that listens to you and whispers into your ear.
Animatronic skeleton The current implementation of the Cellulars Squirrel is a remote brain ro bot. It has a duplex audio and duplex data connection to via a class 1 B luetooth module. It is controlled by a PC with a Bluetooth dongle that r uns all the necessary control processes (conversational agent, speech re cognition, animatronics control server, etc). Mechanically, it consists of a brass skeleton with micro servos that control four degrees of freed om (neck up/down, left/right, left and right eyelids). There are also se nsors in its extremities so that it detects the owners touches.
Autonomous Interactive Intermediaries: Social Intel ligence for Mobile Communication Agents. In Doctoral Colloquium Companio n Booklet of ACM conference on Computer supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '04), Chicago, 2004.
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