Event Location: 3305 Newell-Simon Hall
Bio: Professor Ana Paiva is a research group leader at INESC-ID and an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon. She is well known in the area of Virtual Agents, Artificial Intelligence Applied to Education and Affective Computing. After her PhD in the UK (University of Lancaster), she has worked in Germany (in GMD) and in France (CNRS-COAST team at the ENS of Lyon). In 1996 she returned to Portugal where she created a group on intelligent agents and synthetic characters (GAIPS). Her research is focused on the affective elements in the interactions between users and computers. She served as a member of numerous international conference and workshops. She has (co)authored over 100 publications in refereed journals, conferences and books. She was a founding member of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence SIG on Narrative and Learning Environments, and has been very active in the area of Synthetic Characters and Intelligent Agents. She co-ordinated the participation of INESC-ID in several European projects, such as NIMIS (an I3-ESE project), Safira (IST- 5th Framework), where she was the prime contractor, VICTEC, MindRaces, E-Circus (in the 6th framework) and recently in LIREC project in the area of robotic companions.

Abstract: Empathy is often seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others’ emotions. This notion is often seen as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans.
As such, when creating virtual agents, that are believable and able to engage with users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. For the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user’s emotions, but also to adapt to them, and react in an empathic way. This talk will provide an overview of this new challenging area of research, by analyzing empathy in the social relations established between humans and virtual agents or social robots. To illustrate these notions, a concrete model for the creation of empathic agents will be presented with some examples of both virtual agents and social robots.