Hae Won Park - Long-term Relational Agents and How They Influence the Human Mind
Speaker
Hae Won Park
CSAIL MIT
Host
Arvind Satyanarayan
CSAIL MIT
Abstract:
In this talk, I’d like to engage our community to think about the dimensions of evaluating AI algorithms and systems that we build - recall, precision, accuracy, and F1 scores? Ultimately, we need to measure the impact they make in people’s lives in the real-world contexts. To this end, I’d also like to raise a popular question we get asked often - “do artificial agents need social, emotional intelligence?”
I will highlight a number of provocative research findings from our recent long-term deployment of social agents in homes, schools, and living communities engaging families, young children, and older adults. We employ an affective reinforcement learning approach to personalize robot’s actions to modulate each user’s engagement and maximize the interaction benefit. The agent observes users’ verbal and nonverbal affective cues to understand the user state and to receive feedback on its actions. Our results show that the interaction with an AI companion influences users’ beliefs, learning, and how they interact with others. The affective personalization boosts these effects and helps sustain long-term engagement. During our deployment studies, we observed that people treat and interact with artificial agents as social partners and catalysts. We also learned that the effect of the interaction strongly correlates to the social relational bonding the user has built with the robot. So, to answer the question “do AI agents need socio-emotive intelligence,” I argue that we should only draw conclusions based on what impact it has on the people living with it - is it helping us flourish in the direction that we want to thrive?
Bio:
Hae Won Park is a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab and a Principal Investigator of the Social Robot Companions for Aging and Contextualized Intelligence Grants. Her research focuses on socio-emotive AI and personalization of socially embodied agents that support long-term interaction and relationship building with users. Her work is applied to a range of real-world domains including early childhood education in homes and schools and healthier aging in place. Her research has been published at top robotics, HCI, and AI venues and has received many awards for best paper and innovative robot applications. Hae Won received her PhD from Georgia Tech in 2014, at which time she also co-founded Zyrobotics, an assistive education AI startup, to support play and education for neurodiverse learners.
For those who might wish to attend remotely, the seminar will also be on Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97853464430
This is a Tim Tickets event. Please bring your MIT ID or scan the QR code on your phone: https://tim-tickets.atlas-apps.mit.edu/SemeF5LMByDYQSBz7.
In this talk, I’d like to engage our community to think about the dimensions of evaluating AI algorithms and systems that we build - recall, precision, accuracy, and F1 scores? Ultimately, we need to measure the impact they make in people’s lives in the real-world contexts. To this end, I’d also like to raise a popular question we get asked often - “do artificial agents need social, emotional intelligence?”
I will highlight a number of provocative research findings from our recent long-term deployment of social agents in homes, schools, and living communities engaging families, young children, and older adults. We employ an affective reinforcement learning approach to personalize robot’s actions to modulate each user’s engagement and maximize the interaction benefit. The agent observes users’ verbal and nonverbal affective cues to understand the user state and to receive feedback on its actions. Our results show that the interaction with an AI companion influences users’ beliefs, learning, and how they interact with others. The affective personalization boosts these effects and helps sustain long-term engagement. During our deployment studies, we observed that people treat and interact with artificial agents as social partners and catalysts. We also learned that the effect of the interaction strongly correlates to the social relational bonding the user has built with the robot. So, to answer the question “do AI agents need socio-emotive intelligence,” I argue that we should only draw conclusions based on what impact it has on the people living with it - is it helping us flourish in the direction that we want to thrive?
Bio:
Hae Won Park is a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab and a Principal Investigator of the Social Robot Companions for Aging and Contextualized Intelligence Grants. Her research focuses on socio-emotive AI and personalization of socially embodied agents that support long-term interaction and relationship building with users. Her work is applied to a range of real-world domains including early childhood education in homes and schools and healthier aging in place. Her research has been published at top robotics, HCI, and AI venues and has received many awards for best paper and innovative robot applications. Hae Won received her PhD from Georgia Tech in 2014, at which time she also co-founded Zyrobotics, an assistive education AI startup, to support play and education for neurodiverse learners.
For those who might wish to attend remotely, the seminar will also be on Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97853464430
This is a Tim Tickets event. Please bring your MIT ID or scan the QR code on your phone: https://tim-tickets.atlas-apps.mit.edu/SemeF5LMByDYQSBz7.