Can Avatars Fight Fraud? How Virtual Business Environments Facilitate Learning More About Fraud Investigation and Prevention

In today's increasingly complex business environment, accounting firms face additional pressures regarding cost reduction, engagement scope, and attention to quality. This paper proposes that embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are particularly well suited to automate and augment accounting interviews to save costs, streamline the interviewing process, and maintain quality. An ECA is an autonomous computer interface capable of human-like interactions such as interviews. This paper describes how an ECA can be used to augment accounting-related interviews and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. This paper also presents the ECA Self-Disclosure Model with propositions of how self-disclosure can be influenced by an ECA through reciprocal behavior and rapport building. The model and propositions are supported by the computers-as-social-actors (CASA) paradigm (Reeves and Nass 1996). This paper concludes by discussing limitations of ECA use in the real world and by recommending how the model and propositions can be tested empirically in future research.

“I felt her company”: A qualitative study on factors affecting closeness and emotional support seeking with an embodied conversational agent

Virtual worlds are developing rapidly over the Internet. They are visited by avatars and staffed with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). An avatar is a representation of a physical person. Each person controls one or several avatars and usually receives feedback from the virtual world on an audio-visual display. Ideally, all senses should be used to feel fully embedded in a virtual world. Sound, vision and sometimes touch are the available modalities. This paper reviews the technological developments which enable audio-visual interactions in virtual and augmented reality worlds. Emphasis is placed on speech and gesture interfaces, including talking face analysis and synthesis.KeywordsHuman Machine Interactions (HMI)Multimodality SpeechFaceGestureVirtual Words

Intelligent agents in the form of avatars in networked virtual worlds (VWs) are a new form of embodied conversational agent (ECA). They are still a topic of active research, but promise soon to rival the sophistication of virtual human agents developed on stand-alone platforms over the last decade. Such agents in today’s VWs grew out of two lines of historical research: Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Their merger forms the basis for today’s persistent 3D worlds occupied by intelligent characters serving a wide range of purposes. We believe ECA avatars will help to enable VWs to achieve a higher level of meaningful interaction by providing increased engagement and responsiveness within environments where people will interact with and even develop relationships with them.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), in its recent auditor inspections, cited a lack of professional skepticism and selection of appropriate audit procedures as serious problems for auditors and has suggested that the tone set by audit partners is critical for auditors’ fraud investigations. Nelson (2009) presented a model of professional skepticism in auditing. This study investigates selected components of Nelson’s model: the effects of the partner’s emphasis on professional skepticism and the presence of fraud on auditors’ identification of fraud risk factors, auditors’ fraud risk assessments, and their selection of audit procedures. Thus, we extend Nelson’s professional skepticism model by providing an initial test of predictions of the links established in his model and suggesting additional interactive links based on our results. Consistent with predictions of the model, results from our experiment suggest that auditors’ fraud risk assessments are (1) higher when fraud is present than when it is not and (2) higher with a partner who emphasizes an attitude of professional skepticism than with a partner who places less emphasis on professional skepticism. Interestingly, we find that auditors’ choice of appropriate fraud audit procedures is responsive to their fraud risk assessments when fraud is present, but only with a partner who emphasizes professional skepticism. This pattern of results is also observed in auditors’ identification of fraud risk factors. These results should be informative to both standard setters and academic researchers because they highlight the costs and benefits of audit partners’ tone at the top on auditors’ evaluation of fraud.

Within Human-Computer Interaction, there has recently been an important turn to embodied and voice-based interaction. In this chapter, we discuss our ongoing research on building online Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), specifically, their interactive 3D web graphics aspects. We present ECAs based on our technological pipeline, which integrates a number of free online editors, such as Adobe Fuse CC or MakeHuman, and standards, mainly BML (Behaviour Markup Language). We claim that making embodiment available for online ECAs is attainable, and advantageous over current alternatives, mostly desktop-based. In this chapter we also report on initial results of activities aimed to explore the physical appearance of ECAs for older people. A group of them (N = 14) designed female ECAs. Designing them was easy and great fun. The perspective on older-adult HCI introduced in this chapter is mostly technological, allowing for rapid online experimentations to address key issues, such as anthropomorphic aspects, in the design of ECAs with, and for, older people.

Development of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) has tended to focus on the character’s dialog capabilities, with less research on the design and effect of the agent’s voice and of the virtual environments in which the agent exists. For a study of human-ECA rapport, we iteratively developed three versions of a game featuring an ECA, where each version of the game had a different combination of speech generation and virtual environment. Evaluations of the users’ interactions with the different versions of the game enabled us to assess the effects of changes in the agent’s voice and of changes in the agent’s virtual world.

In this paper we present a discussion about believability for Virtual Environments, emotional simulation and also Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). We will discuss about the definition of believability and the three elements of believability environments (immersion, presentation and interaction). We also present a discussion about believability and interfaces. Finally, ECA, emotional and personnality simulation are explained and presented.

There are benefits for social and behavioral researchers to conduct studies in online virtual worlds. However, typically learning scripting takes additional time or money to hire a consultant. We propose a prototype Virtual World Toolkit for to help researchers design, set up, and run experiments in Virtual Worlds, with little coding or scripting experience needed. We explored three types of prototype designs, focused on a traditional interface with pilot results. We also present results of initial expert user study of our toolkit to determine the learnability, usability, and feasibility of our toolkit to conduct experiments. Results suggest that our toolkit requires little training and sufficient capabilities for a basic experiment. The toolkit received a great feedback from a number of expert users who thought that it is a promising first version that lays the foundation to more future improvements. This toolkit prototype contributes to enhancing researchers’ capabilities in conducting social/behavioral studies in virtual worlds and hopefully will empower social and behavioral researchers by proving a toolkit prototype that requires less time, efforts and costs to setup stimulus responses types of human subject studies in virtual worlds.

We are at a critical moment in the study of virtual worlds, where there is great need for theoretical work to clarify what research on virtual worlds can offer. In this article I seek to help set our theoretical affairs in order, with regard to the future of virtual worlds (and thus our research on virtual worlds). First, the false opposition between “virtual” and “real” fails to capture the many ways virtual worlds are real (and the many ways that not everything in the physical world is real). Second, virtual worlds are valuable to study regardless of their size; we should not mistake size for significance, and encourage study of larger and smaller virtual worlds. Third, virtual worlds share features with each other and with other online socialities, but also have specific aspects that differ; studying both these similarities and differences is valuable to comprehensive and comparative research.

ABSTRACT: The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), in its recent auditor inspections, cited a lack of professional skepticism and selection of appropriate audit procedures as serious problems for auditors, and suggested that the tone set by audit partners is critical for auditors' fraud investigations. We investigate selected components of Nelson's (2009) model of professional skepticism: the effects of the partner's emphasis on professional skepticism and the effect of the level of fraud indicators on auditors' identification of fraud risk factors, auditors' fraud risk assessments, and their selection of audit procedures. Thus, we provide an initial test of predictions of the links established in his model, and our results suggest a possible extension to his model. This study provides evidence that a partner's emphasis on professional skepticism is critical for both effective and efficient identification of relevant fraud risk factors and choice of relevant audit procedures. These results should be informative to both standard setters and academic researchers because they highlight the costs and benefits of an audit partner's attitude toward professional skepticism on the evaluation of fraud.

This paper will provide the rationale for and capabilities of simple intelligent agents and more advanced Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as an augmentation to the Systems Engineering Professor and Systems Engineering Mentor. The use of these agents to support in‐house Systems Engineering Management training and mentoring efforts with a limited number of teachers and practitioners is discussed.Suppose an intelligent agent or ECA could provide real‐time support to a student that reduces the need for direct instructor involvement. Perhaps a practitioner with a real world problem needs performance support after core business hours. These agents provide a spectrum of capabilities from a series of indexed Frequently Asked Questions to a highly tailored context intelligent response? Yes, this approach allows users to have an interaction with a “guide/mentor” who answers direct questions and can sometimes anticipate the next in the thread based on user profiling. The ECA can react appropriately to the question, tailor the response and generally seem lifelike.How would you go about developing this capability? Is there added benefit in preparing new faculty? How would the practitioner benefit? By discussing the use in terms of the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) and using an existing Systems Engineering case study we'll explore the answers to these questions.

SYNOPSIS The governance literature (e.g., Archambeault, DeZoort, and Holt 2008) highlights the lack of internal audit information available to external stakeholders and discusses the need for a publicly available internal audit report (IAR) to describe the function and/or provide assurance. We study the effects of IAR type (i.e., descriptive IAR, assurance IAR) and internal audit reporting relationship (i.e., primarily to management or primarily to the audit committee) on internal auditors' judgments. Specifically, 108 experienced internal auditors provided fraud risk and control risk assessments in an experiment where IAR type and reporting relationship were manipulated randomly between subjects. Fraud risk assessments are higher (more conservative) when internal auditors provide assurance in an IAR or when they report primarily to the audit committee. A significant interaction indicates that internal auditors provide higher control risk assessments when they provide assurance in an IAR and report primarily to the audit committee. Providing descriptive information in an IAR to external stakeholders does not significantly affect internal auditors' fraud risk or control risk assessments. Supplemental results indicate moderate and varied support among internal auditors for the issuance of a descriptive IAR to external stakeholders, but significantly less support for the issuance of an assurance IAR. The results, in combination with Holt and DeZoort's (2009) evidence regarding the effect of descriptive IARs on investors' judgments, suggest the need for discussions of the value of IARs in practice.

Mixed reality, as an approach in human-computer interaction, is often implicitly tied to particular implementation techniques (e.g., see-through device) and modalities (e.g., visual, graphical displays). In this paper we attempt to clarify the definition of mixed reality as a more abstract concept of combining the real and virtual worlds – that is, mixed reality is not a given technology but a concept that considers how the virtual and real worlds can be combined. Further, we use this discussion to posit robots as mixed-reality devices, and present a set of implications and questions for what this implies for mixed-reality interaction with robots.

In recent years, participation of children in virtual worlds has grown and children are also the largest number of users of virtual worlds (KZero, 2009a). This growth in participation in virtual worlds has brought out discussion about their effects on children’s lives. In this article, we consider opportunities of virtual worlds to engage and educate children about their civic life. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework for participation in virtual worlds and to test the framework by looking at current participatory practices in virtual worlds. In this paper we present a framework for children’s participation in virtual worlds which is based on research review. Our framework sees children in virtual worlds as social actors, learners of civic participation and as citizens. Results of a survey conducted to find the participatory practices of children in virtual worlds are also presented. The results indicate that children are highly interested in socializing with friends and engaging in avatar related activities. It was also found that traditional forms of civic participation are not very common in virtual worlds. Thus, there is a need to promote traditional forms of civic participation and at the same time look at new opportunities presented by virtual worlds for civic participation.