Research & Projects - COMPASS

Eine ältere Person schaut auf einen Bildschirm, auf dem ein Tagesplaner abgebildet ist.

04/2015 - 10/2018Socially cooperative virtual assistants as day companions for people with support needs (KOMPASS)

With demographic change and, in the field of inclusion, a growing number of people need support to maintain their daily routines, daily structuring and maintaining social contacts. The KOMPASS project investigates the extent to which assistance technologies can help people to lead an extended self-determined and socially integrated life. To this end, a virtual assistant ("Billie") is being developed as a day companion for senior citizens and people with cognitive impairments in an interdisciplinary team and tested in the everyday context of the v. Bodelschwinghschen Stifungen Bethel.

The goal is a new type of assistance technology which focuses on abilities for socially cooperative, "empathetic" interaction in order to ensure understanding, acceptance and support of the users. This will be explored using the example of calendar practices - entering appointments, remembering, everyday practices of structuring the day.

In the sub-project 'Communication & Interactional Linguistics', the following aspects are investigated:

  • Everyday practices of support for people with cognitive impairments
  • Multimodal methods of ensuring comprehension in human-agent interaction
  • Interactional adaptation effects of the users to the technical dialogue design
    • Integration of the assistance system into the user's everyday life
    • Ethical-Interactional Implications of Assistive Technologies

Methodologically, a combination of empirical procedures on human-agent interaction and human face-to-face interaction in everyday life and semi-experimental laboratory settings is used: Multimodal Conversation Analysis, Eye Tracking, Ethnographic Fieldwork, Interview/Focus Groups.

Publications

Overview:

  • Kopp, S., Brandt, M., Buschmeier, H., Cyra, K., Freigang, F., Krämer, N., Kummet, F., Opfermann, C., Pitsch, K., Schillingmann, L., Straßmann, C., Wall, E., Yaghoubzadeh, R. (2018). Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users. The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue. In: Proceedings AAMAS 2018 Workshop on Intelligent Converstional Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications, Stockholm, Sweden, S. 10-17. [Full Text]

Calendar practices in everyday user life

  • Cyra, K., Amrhein, A., & Pitsch, K. (2016). Fallstudien zur Alltagsrelevanz von Zeit- und Kalenderkonzepten. In: Mensch und Computer 2016 - Kurzbeiträge, Aachen, S. 1-5. [Full Text]

  • Amrhein, A., Cyra, K., & Pitsch, K. (2016). Processes of Reminding and Requesting in Supporting People with Special Needs. Human Practices as Basis for Modeling a Virtual Assistant? In: ECAI 2016 - Workshop "Ethics in the Design of Intelligent Agents" (EDIA), The Hague, S. 18-23. [Full Text]

Appointment entry (suggestions, precision, repair strategies, emergence of utterances)

  • Opfermann, C., & Pitsch, K. (2018). Der technische Zwang zur Präzision bei temporalen Angaben. Interaktives Termine-Eintragen mit einem Assistenzsystem in der Behinderten- und Altenhilfe (Poster). In: GAL 2018, Essen, Germany. [DOI]

  • Opfermann, C., Pitsch, K., Yaghoubzadeh, R., & Kopp, S. (2017). The Communicative Activity of 'Making Suggestions' as an Interactional Process. Towards a Dialog Model for HAI. In: HAI 2017, Bielefeld, S. 161-170. [DOI]

  • Opfermann, C., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Reprompts as Error Handling Strategy in Human-Agent-Dialog? User Responses to a System's Display of Non-Understanding. In: Ro-Man 2017, Lisbon, S. 310-316. [DOI]

  • Cyra, K., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Dealing with Long Utterances. How to Interrupt the User in a Socially Acceptable Manner? In: HAI 2017, Bielefeld, S. 341-345. [DOI]

  • Cyra, K., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Dealing with 'Long Turns' Produced by Users of an Assistive System. How Missing Uptake and Recipiency Lead to Turn Increments. Ro-Man 2017, Lisbon, S. 329-334. [DOI]

  • Pitsch, K., Yaghoubzadeh, R., & Kopp, S. (2015). Entering Appointments: Flexibility and the Need for Structure? In: GSCL 2015, Essen, S. 140-141. [Full Text]

System Design & Dialogue Management

  • Yaghoubzadeh, R., Pitsch, K., & Kopp, S. (2015). Adaptive Grounding and Dialogue Management for Autonomous Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users. In: IVA 2015, Delft, 28-38. [DOI]

Funded by:

BMBF joint project "Technik zum Menschen bringen" (Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Stefan Kopp)

​Logo_BMBF

Project team:

Academic Team

In cooperation with:

Universität Bielefeld, CITEC 

Universität Duisburg-Essen

 FH Bielefeld

Bodelschwinghsche Stiftung Bethel 

  • Sonja Friedhof
  • Melissa Henne
  • Albrecht Strangier