Dean Thurston - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Dean Thurston
Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platf... more Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platform for authoring research studies and teaching about how to conduct research a necessary progression. In this paper, we discuss Mad Science, a playful platform that is being created to allow users to create behavioral experiments. We discuss iterations of the authoring tools, including lessons learned, and the need for AI assistance to guide and teach users.
Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2021
Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential amb... more Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how the answers to such questions can be used to resolve ambiguity. To address this, we analyzed dialogue data from an interactive study in which participants controlled a virtual robot tasked with organizing a set of tools while engaging in dialogue with a live, remote experimenter. We discovered a number of novel results, including the distribution of question types used to resolve ambiguity and the influence of dialogue-level factors on the reference resolution process. Based on these empirical findings we: (1) developed a computational model for clarification requests using a decision network with an entropybased utility assignment method that operates across modalities, (2) evaluated the model, showing that it outperforms a slot-filling baseline in environments of varying ambiguity, and (3) interpreted the results to offer insight into the ways that agents can ask questions to facilitate situated reference resolution. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • Computing methodologies → Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics; Bayesian network models.
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion, 2017
Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platf... more Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platform for authoring research studies and teaching about how to conduct research a necessary progression. In this paper, we discuss Mad Science, a playful platform that is being created to allow users to create behavioral experiments. We discuss iterations of the authoring tools, including lessons learned, and the need for AI assistance to guide and teach users.
Effective coordination is a critical requirement for human teaming, and is increasingly needed in... more Effective coordination is a critical requirement for human teaming, and is increasingly needed in teams of humans and robots. Building on decades of work in the behavioral literature, we have implemented a computational framework for coordination based on Shared Mental Models (SMMs) in which robots use a distributed knowledge base to coordinate activity. We also built a novel system connecting the robotic architecture, DIARC, to the 3D simulation environment, Unity, to serve as an evaluation platform for the framework implementation, and also for more general explorations of teaming with autonomous robots. Using this platform, we ran a user study to evaluate the framework by comparing performance of teams in which the robots used SMMs with those that did not. We found that teams in which the robots used SMMs significantly outperformed those without SMMs. This represents the first empirical demonstration that SMMs can be successfully used by fully autonomous robots interacting in nat...
Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platf... more Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platform for authoring research studies and teaching about how to conduct research a necessary progression. In this paper, we discuss Mad Science, a playful platform that is being created to allow users to create behavioral experiments. We discuss iterations of the authoring tools, including lessons learned, and the need for AI assistance to guide and teach users.
Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2021
Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential amb... more Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how the answers to such questions can be used to resolve ambiguity. To address this, we analyzed dialogue data from an interactive study in which participants controlled a virtual robot tasked with organizing a set of tools while engaging in dialogue with a live, remote experimenter. We discovered a number of novel results, including the distribution of question types used to resolve ambiguity and the influence of dialogue-level factors on the reference resolution process. Based on these empirical findings we: (1) developed a computational model for clarification requests using a decision network with an entropybased utility assignment method that operates across modalities, (2) evaluated the model, showing that it outperforms a slot-filling baseline in environments of varying ambiguity, and (3) interpreted the results to offer insight into the ways that agents can ask questions to facilitate situated reference resolution. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • Computing methodologies → Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics; Bayesian network models.
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion, 2017
Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platf... more Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platform for authoring research studies and teaching about how to conduct research a necessary progression. In this paper, we discuss Mad Science, a playful platform that is being created to allow users to create behavioral experiments. We discuss iterations of the authoring tools, including lessons learned, and the need for AI assistance to guide and teach users.
Effective coordination is a critical requirement for human teaming, and is increasingly needed in... more Effective coordination is a critical requirement for human teaming, and is increasingly needed in teams of humans and robots. Building on decades of work in the behavioral literature, we have implemented a computational framework for coordination based on Shared Mental Models (SMMs) in which robots use a distributed knowledge base to coordinate activity. We also built a novel system connecting the robotic architecture, DIARC, to the 3D simulation environment, Unity, to serve as an evaluation platform for the framework implementation, and also for more general explorations of teaming with autonomous robots. Using this platform, we ran a user study to evaluate the framework by comparing performance of teams in which the robots used SMMs with those that did not. We found that teams in which the robots used SMMs significantly outperformed those without SMMs. This represents the first empirical demonstration that SMMs can be successfully used by fully autonomous robots interacting in nat...