Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Assistant for Improving Awareness in Mobile Messaging

Abstract

Mobile messaging suffers from the lack of effective communication cues that help people infer the availability of others, like in face-to-face communication. My research focuses on designing, implementing, and evaluating an agent that can communicate unavailability to message senders. The design encompasses three phases (1) user modeling – understanding the recipient’s state; (2) preference modeling – understanding both recipient and sender preferences; (3) learning and adaptability – adjusting self-behavior or appropriating the agent to accomplish desired behavior. My dissertation research explores what factors are important in this design and how we can empower control back to users through user-agent interaction.