Dialogue Systems for Longitudinal Health Counseling Timothy W. Bickmore, Ph.D. Assistant Professor College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University Friday, January 30, 2009 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Perreault Hall, Fuller Labs Abstract: In this talk I will give an overview of research my lab has been conducting into the development and evaluation of animated conversational agents designed to promote healthy behavior, such as medication adherence, exercise and diet. In addition to fielding desktop and wearable systems for health behavior change counseling, we have just started a clinical trial of a virtual nurse that is talking to hospital patients at Boston Medical Center to counsel them on their post-discharge self-care procedures. I will discuss many of the challenges in building these systems, including: building and maintaining trust with patients over time; maintenance of discourse and relational models between conversations; generation of appropriate nonverbal behavior; and implementation of health behavior change and educational strategies. Finally, I will focus on the problem of designing these systems to promote re-use of dialogue components through the use of a standard hierarchical task description language (Prof. Rich's CEA-2018) and appropriately designed ontologies of concepts from health behavior change. ______ Dr. Bickmore is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. The focus of his research is on the development and evaluation of computer agents that emulate face-to-face interactions between health providers and patients for use in health education and long-term health behavior change interventions, with a particular focus on the emotional and relational aspects of these interactions. Prior to Northeastern, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Bickmore received his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, studying under Profs. Rosalind Picard (Affective Computing) and Justine Cassell (Gesture and Narrative Language), doing his dissertation work studying emotional interactions between people and animated computer characters. Host: Professor Charles Rich Refreshments will be served. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu Last modified: January 27, 2009

Department of Computer Science - Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609-2280
Phone: +1-508-831-5357 - Fax: +1-508-831-5776 - cs@wpi.edu