Situated and embodied interactions for symbiotic and inclusive societies

Abstract

Our daily life is occupied by a large variety of social actions toward other agents such as asking questions, making promises, expressing gratitude, making offers, making requests, giving warnings, making apologies, and so on, as suggested by speech act theory. We do so to live a better life by collaborating or coordinating our behavior with others. Social interactions are not monolithic. Usually, the above actions consist of smaller pieces of embodied behavior such as hand gestures or eye gaze in addition to spoken utterances. At the same time, they form a longitudinal process of human network development with a varying strength of trust. Based on a bilateral definition of social intelligence, that is, an individual’s ability to manage relationships with other agents and act wisely in a social situation, and an attribute of a group of people to manage complexity and learn from experiences as a function of a well-designed social structure (Nishida 2001), researchers in social intelligence design have been attempting to uncover the detailed principles and mechanisms as well as incorporate insights into artificial systems at different levels of abstraction. The first social intelligence design workshop held in 2001 identified five subjects in social intelligence design: theoretical aspects, methods of establishing the social context, embodied conversational agents, collaboration design, and public discourse. In the following workshops, further topics have been explored, such as mediated communication and interaction (Fruchter et al. 2005), natural interaction (Nijholt and Nishida 2006), collaboration technology and multidisciplinary perspectives (Fruchter et al. 2007), evaluation and modeling (Miura and Matsumura 2009), ambient intelligence (Nijholt et al. 2009), and designing socially aware interaction (Cavallin et al. 2010). This special issue contains a selection of papers presented at the 8th International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design held in Kyoto in November 2009. This workshop focused on situated and embodied interactions for symbiotic and inclusive societies acknowledging the need for designing tools, procedures, techniques, and frameworks to improve interactions by addressing socially or ecologically related factors.