For many years, the HCI community has harbored a vision of interacting with intelligent, embodied computer agents. However, the reality of this vision remains elusive. From an interaction design perspective, little is known about how to specifically design an embodied agent to support the task it will perform and the social interactions that will result. This paper presents design research that explores the relationship between the visual features of embodied agents and the tasks they perform, and the social attributions that result. Our results show a clear link between agent task and agent form and reveals that people often prefer agents who conform to gender stereotypes associated with tasks. Based on the results of this work, we provide a set of emerging design considerations to help guide interaction designers in creating the visual form of embodied agents.

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This paper describes a ‘Human in the Loop' evaluation of an early prototype mixed-initiative control system that generated plans for single operator supervision of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) missions. The objectives of the evaluation were to assess to what extent human operators were able to understand the plans generated by the automated controllers as well as to point to additional support requirements to drive further development of mixed-initiative planning systems. Six former fighter pilots served as test participants. Multiple convergent measures were utilized to evaluate the ability of users to understand and evaluate the plans generated by the automated controller. While test participants were able to understand the plans, the results provided compelling evidence for the need to communicate more effectively the rationale behind plan elements proposed by the automated controller and to provide ‘levers' to enable the user to modify the plan. These results point to important challenges for design of ‘mixed-initiative’ controllers to enable the human and automated controller to function as effective ‘partners’.

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