The Spectrum of Proactive Functioning in Digital Companions
Journal
Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2024-12-01
Author(s)
Abstract
The future of proactive Digital Companions (DCs)-smart agents capable of assisting and protecting their users-lies in their ability to collaborate effectively with users, learn their preferences, and adjust their behavior according to the user's current state and their environment. To achieve this, DCs must carefully strike a balance between acting autonomously, while keeping users informed to minimize inconveniences, thereby enhancing user acceptance. In this article, we conduct a user survey to enrich the architecture of proactive personal DCs that explores the trade-off between full autonomous functioning and ensuring sufficient user control in various critical and non-critical scenarios. Our findings indicate that most of the participants lean towards having control over the actions of DCs, and will actively collaborate with those systems in everyday situations, in which decisions are not urgent. However, participants would not mind yielding their control to DCs in time-sensitive or urgent scenarios. Furthermore, in our survey, participants highlighted the importance of explaining such actions well. Given the results from our survey, we implemented a system prototype with the enriched architecture of an explainable and unobtrusive proactive DC for a smart home environment. The actions of this DC are not always fully autonomous and follow our survey findings.
Keywords
Scene Understanding
Proactive
Video
Digital Assistants
Digital Companion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
ACM
Subject(s)
Division(s)
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
open.access
Name
3701571.3701606.pdf
Size
2.97 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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