Ritwik Banerji Published on Interactions with Artificial Social Agents
Ritwik Banerji (Music) published "De-instrumentalizing HCI: Social Psychology, Rapport Formation, and Interactions with Artificial Social Agents" in Springer's New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 1 - Technologies, part of the Human Computer Interaction series!
From the introduction of this volume:
As the first extensive exploration of contemporary third wave HCI, this handbook covers key developments at the leading edge of human-computer interactions. Now in its second decade as a major current of HCI research, the third wave integrates insights from the humanities and social sciences to emphasize human dimensions beyond workplace efficiency or cognitive capacities. The earliest HCI work was strongly based on the concept of human-machine coupling, which expanded to workplace collaboration as computers came into mainstream professional use. Today HCI can connect to almost any human experience because there are new applications for every aspect of daily life.
Volume 1 - Technologies covers technical application areas related to artificial intelligence, metacreation, machine learning, perceptual computing, 3D printing, critical making, physical computing, the internet of things, accessibility, sonification, natural language processing, multimodal display, and virtual reality.
Read Ritwik's abstract below!
Decisions in designing artificial social interactants to reproduce culturally-specific forms of human sociality evince a range of conceptions of the norms and cognitive processes involved in the human social interactions themselves. Regarding the use of machine learning (ML) in such systems, decisions whether or not to use this approach implicitly presents questions on the nature of the interpersonal adaptation that takes place and indicate a range of conceptions of the values which structure these interactions. In the design of virtual performers of musical free improvisation, several designers assume that the experience of equal partnership between improvisers can only be afforded through deployment of ML in such systems. By contrast, tests of agents not based in ML reveal that human beings experience illusions of “adaptation” in interactions with systems which lack any adaptive capacity. Such results suggest that HCI research with artificial social interactants may be used to raise new questions about the nature of human interaction and interpersonal adaptation in the formation of relationships over time.
You can read the article here.