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1. Community-Based Cultural Tailoring of Virtual Agents

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423875  

   O'Leary, Teresa K.; Stowell, Elizabeth; Kimani, Everlyne; Parmar, Dhaval; Olafsson, Stefan; Hoffman, Jessica; Parker, Andrea G.; Paasche-Orlow, Michael K.; Bickmore, Timothy (October 2020, IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents)

   null (Ed.)

   Culturally informed design for virtual agents has been shown to positively impact health outcomes when tailored to target audiences. We present a participatory design methodology for culturally tailoring virtual agents. Investigators worked with key informants from our target population, members of predominantly Black church communities, to design culturally-relevant and sensitive virtual agent health promotion interventions. In the first participatory session, key informants designed agents to assist them with different aspects of their lives, providing input on agent appearance and agent functionality. In a second design session, participants re-wrote the content of a health conversation with an agent, to include personally-relevant content related to their community (e.g., religious and scriptural references). We report design principles for religious tailoring derived from these studies. We conducted a validation study to assess the effects of applying these principles to agents that promoted two health behaviors, finding that participants responded very positively to the tailored agents. 

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2. RAISE: Robotics & AI to improve STEM and social skills for elementary school students

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.968312  

   Hughes, Charles E.; Dieker, Lisa A.; Glavey, Eileen M.; Hines, Rebecca A.; Wilkins, Ilene; Ingraham, Kathleen; Bukaty, Caitlyn A.; Ali, Kamran; Shah, Sachin; Murphy, John; et al (October 2022, Frontiers in Virtual Reality)

   The authors present the design and implementation of an exploratory virtual learning environment that assists children with autism (ASD) in learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills along with improving social-emotional and communication skills. The primary contribution of this exploratory research is how educational research informs technological advances in triggering a virtual AI companion (AIC) for children in need of social-emotional and communication skills development. The AIC adapts to students’ varying levels of needed support. This project began by using puppetry control (human-in-the-loop) of the AIC, assisting students with ASD in learning basic coding, practicing their social skills with the AIC, and attaining emotional recognition and regulation skills for effective communication and learning. The student is given the challenge to program a robot, Dash™, to move in a square. Based on observed behaviors, the puppeteer controls the virtual agent’s actions to support the student in coding the robot. The virtual agent’s actions that inform the development of the AIC include speech, facial expressions, gestures, respiration, and heart color changes coded to indicate emotional state. The paper provides exploratory findings of the first 2 years of this 5-year scaling-up research study. The outcomes discussed align with a common approach of research design used for students with disabilities, called single case study research. This type of design does not involve random control trial research; instead, the student acts as her or his own control subject. Students with ASD have substantial individual differences in their social skill deficits, behaviors, communications, and learning needs, which vary greatly from the norm and from other individuals identified with this disability. Therefore, findings are reported as changes within subjects instead of across subjects. While these exploratory observations serve as a basis for longer term research on a larger population, this paper focuses less on student learning and more on evolving technology in AIC and supporting students with ASD in STEM environments. 

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3. Agent-Based Complex Systems Science in the Era of Global Sustainability Crisis

   https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.1571.v1  

   An, Li; Turner_II, B L; Liu, Jianguo; Grimm, Volker; Zhang, Qi; Wang, Zhangyang; Huang, Ruihong (September 2023, www.preprints.org)

   A significant number and range of challenges besetting sustainability can be traced to the actions and interactions of multiple autonomous agents (people mostly) and the entities they create (e.g., institutions, policies, social network) in the corresponding social-environmental systems (SES). To address these challenges, we need to understand decisions made and actions taken by agents, the outcomes of their actions, including the feedbacks on the corresponding agents and environment. The science of Agent-based Complex Systems—ACS science—has a significant potential to handle such challenges. The advantages of ACS science for sustainability are addressed by way of identifying the key elements and challenges in sustainability science, the generic features of ACS, and the key advances and challenges in modeling ACS. Artificial intelligence and data science promise to improve understanding of agents’ behaviors, detect SES structures, and formulate SES mechanisms. 

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4. Complex adaptive systems science in the era of global sustainability crisis

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geosus.2024.09.011  

   An, Li; Turner, BL; Liu, Jianguo; Grimm, Volker; Zhang, Qi; Wang, Zhangyang; Huang, Ruihong (November 2024, Geography and Sustainability)

   A significant number and range of challenges besetting sustainability can be traced to the actions and interactions of multiple autonomous agents (people mostly) and the entities they create (e.g., institutions, policies, social network) in the corresponding social-environmental systems (SES). To address these challenges, we need to understand decisions made and actions taken by agents, the outcomes of their actions, including the feedbacks on the corresponding agents and environment. The science of complex adaptive systems—CAS science—has a significant potential to handle such challenges. We address the advantages of CAS science for sustainability by identifying the key elements and challenges in sustainability science, the generic features of CAS, and the key advances and challenges in modeling CAS. Artificial intelligence and data science combined with agent-based modeling promise to improve understanding of agents’ behaviors, detect SES structures, and formulate SES mechanisms. 

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5. Pandemics & people: Designing a virtual epidemic event for immersive, connected, and playful participation in an infectious disease outbreak.

   Fields, D. A. (January 2022, Educational designer)

   Researchers and educators have identified an urgent need for more rigorous teaching and learning about epidemiology topics and practices, such as engaging in behaviors that prevent the spread of viral disease such as COVID-19. Responding to this need, we designed a virtual epidemic as a special event hosted in a virtual world. In this paper we share the strategic, tactical, and detailed design of the SPIKEY-20 virtual epidemic and data that reflects back on the design in terms of player participation. Reflecting on the design, we ask: What kinds of players participated in the SPIKEY-20 virtual epidemic? How did players engage in designed activities (i.e., preventive measures, information seeking)? In what ways were players influenced by the concurrent real world pandemic of COVID-19? In the discussion we consider the potential connection points between real-life and virtual public health behaviors, new possibilities of classroom participation and teacher support for such a virtual event, and future design considerations for virtual epidemics. 

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