Autonomous interactive intermediaries : social intelligence for mobile communication agents

Today's cellphones are passive communication portals. They are neither aware of our conversational settings, nor of the relationship between caller and callee, and often interrupt us at inappropriate times. This thesis is about adding elements of human style social intelligence to our mobile communication devices in order to make them more socially acceptable to both user and local others. I suggest the concept of an Autonomous Interactive Intermediary that assumes the role of an actively mediating party between caller, callee, and co-located people. In order to behave in a socially appropriate way, the Intermediary interrupts with non-verbal cues and attempts to harvest 'residual social intelligence' from the calling party, the called person, the people close by, and its current location. For example, the Intermediary obtains the user's conversational status from a decentralized network of autonomous body-worn sensor nodes. These nodes detect conversational groupings in real time, and provide the Intermediary with the user's conversation size and talk-to-listen ratio. The Intermediary can 'poll' all participants of a face-to-face conversation about the appropriateness of a possible interruption by slightly vibrating their wirelessly actuated finger rings.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Marti, Stefan Johannes Walter, 1965-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Christopher M. Schmandt.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35523
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35523

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35523