Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier (2017-2018 à 2018-2019).

The growing success of dialogue systems research makes embodied conversational agents a perfect candidatex000D
for becoming a standard in human computer interaction including for health related coaching and assistance inx000D
group conversation. The naturalness of communicative acts allows for providing a comfortable ground for thex000D
users to interact with. There have been many advances on using multiple communication channels in dialoguex000D
systems in the way of simulating humaneness in an artificial agent. The proposed research program will studyx000D
human behavior while interacting with these assistive technologies using natural interaction methods in orderx000D
to create an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that enables users to efficiently achieve their goals throughx000D
simply talking with the ECA and receiving answers from it. We aim to build an Intelligent Virtual Agentx000D
(IVA), which automatically intervenes at the right time and provides content and information to the user basedx000D
on user's condition and interest models. The proposed research will develop new theories, models, algorithms,x000D
and technologies to make it easier for users to interact more naturally with less cognitive effort. This work willx000D
also improve the fundamental understanding of how such systems affect humans. Highly qualified personnelx000D
(HQP) will be trained in artificial intelligence (AI) and human computer interaction (HCI), particularly inx000D
natural interaction models. Within social health platforms using say social media groups to help like mindedx000D
users with a related health problem, one big challenge is there are many health conditions, so it is not feasiblex000D
to build and develop community and services for every one of these conditions manually. The solution wouldx000D
be to develop an AI personalized platform which provide scalable, sustainable and automated services andx000D
strategies. Therefore, this research effort is to build a prototype of a personalized intelligent virtual companionx000D
(Agent) that will collect information about the user via conversations, build a user model and will interact withx000D
the user in a specific and customized way via conversation which provides personalized coaching, training andx000D
assistance.