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Co-Investigator
Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Researchers
Sara Bernardini
Project Details
November 2011 - October 2014
Funder: EU - FP7
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Summary
Kaska Porayska-Pomsta is a co-Investigator on TARDIS - a 3 year funded project (EU-FP7) that aims to build a scenario-based serious-game simulation platform for young people at risk of social exclusion, aged 18-25, to explore, practice and improve their social skills. TARDIS will facilitate the interaction through virtual agents (VAs) acting as recruiters in job interviews scenarios. The VAs will be designed to deliver realistic socio-emotional interactions. TARDIS exploits the unique affordances of digital technology, by creating an environment in which the quality and the quantity of emotional display by the agents can be modulated to scaffold the young trainees through a diverse range of possible interview situations. TARDIS consortium comprises 8 European partners from France, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands and includes academic and non-academic experts. At the LKL we are responsible for developing the training scenarios, the user model, including the open learner model and for evaluating the TARDIS platform.
Objective
The number of young people not in employment, education or training
(NEET) is increasing across Europe. Current research reveals that NEETs
often lack self-confidence and the essential social skills needed to
seek and secure employment. Youth inclusion associations across Europe
provide social coaching programmes, in order to help young people
acquire and improve their social competencies. However, it is an
expensive and time-consuming approach that relies on the availability of
trained practitioners as well as the willingness of the young people to
engage in exploring their social strengths and weakness in front of
their peers and practitioners. Digital technologies such as
serious-games offer the advantage of repeatable experience that can be
modulated to suit the individual needs of the young people.
Additionally, such technologies are intrinsically motivating to the
young and carry the potential of removing the many barriers that
real-life situations may pose, in particular the stress associated with
engaging in unfamiliar interactions with others. TARDIS aims to build a
scenario-based serious-game simulation platform for young people at risk
of exclusion, aged 18-25, to explore, practice and improve their social
skills.
TARDIS will facilitate the interaction through
virtual agents (VAs) acting as recruiters in job interviews scenarios.
The VAs are designed to deliver realistic socio-emotional interactions
and are credible, yet tireless interlocutors. TARDIS exploits the unique
affordances of digital technology, by creating an environment in which
the quality and the quantity of emotional display by the agents can be
modulated to scaffold the young trainees through a diverse range of
possible interview situations. The scenarios are co-designed with
experienced practitioners in several European countries in order to
ensure their relevance to the different individuals across a number of
cultural contexts. TARDIS offers three major innovations. First, it will
be able to detect in real-time user's emotions and social attitudes
through voice and facial expression recognition, and to adapt the
progress of the game and the behaviour virtual interlocutors behaviour
to the individual users. Second, it will provide field practitioners
with an intuitive authoring tool for designing appropriate interview
scenarios and for setting agents behaviours without the help of computer
scientists. Third, it will give practitioners a unique access to a
systematic record of the specific difficulties that the users
experience. This will offer new instruments for practitioners to measure
individual's progress in emotion regulation and social skill
acquisition, thus facilitating reflection on their own practice and
enabling a more flexible and personalised coaching for young people at
risk of social exclusion.
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