Towards Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user's social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are presented through a conceptual architecture that centers around two key ideas: (1) conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of `general' situation awareness, and (2) using situation taxonomies as the key element of such instantiation. This enables support agents to represent a user's social situation, comprehend its meaning, and assess its impact on the user's behavior. We discuss empirical results supporting that the proposed approach can be effective and illustrate how the architecture can be used in support agents through a use case.