2023, Pande, Charuta, Martin, Andreas, Pimmer, Christoph

We present an iterative and incremental approach to designing dialog management for a health coach chatbot based on our in-progress research. The requirements are derived from the coaching needs of young people living with HIV. We identify a hybrid dialog management approach to address different coaching needs as well as dialog acts to enable smooth conversations. In addition, relevant technical components were identified to be integrated into the dialogs to improve user experience.

2022, Sandhu, Gurmit, Kilburg, Anne, Martin, Andreas, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Laurenzi, Emanuele, Billing, Erik, Hinkelmann, Knut, Gerber, Aurona

Preschool children, when diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), often ex- perience a long and painful journey on their way to self-advocacy. Access to standard of care is poor, with long waiting times and the feeling of stigmatization in many social set- tings. Early interventions in ASD have been found to deliver promising results, but have a high cost for all stakeholders. Some recent studies have suggested that digital biomarkers (e.g., eye gaze), tracked using affordable wearable devices such as smartphones or tablets, could play a role in identifying children with special needs. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of supporting neurodiverse children with technologies based on digital biomark- ers which can help to a) monitor the performance of children diagnosed with ASD and b) predict those who would benefit most from early interventions. We describe an ongoing feasibility study that uses the “DREAM dataset”, stemming from a clinical study with 61 pre-school children diagnosed with ASD, to identify digital biomarkers informative for the child’s progression on tasks such as imitation of gestures. We describe our vision of a tool that will use these prediction models and that ASD pre-schoolers could use to train certain social skills at home. Our discussion includes the settings in which this usage could be embedded.

2021, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Martin, Andreas, Montecchiari, Devid, Martin, Andreas, Hinkelmann, Knut, Fill, Hans-Georg, Gerber, Aurona, Lenat, Dough, Stolle, Reinhard, Harmelen, Frank van

We present an approach to improve individual and self-regulated learning in group assignments. We focus on supporting individual reflection by providing feedback through a conversational system. Our approach leverages machine learning techniques to recognize concepts in student utterances and combines them with knowledge representation to infer the student’s understanding of an assignment’s cognitive requirements. The conversational agent conducts end-to-end conversations with the students and prompts them to reflect and improve their understanding of an assignment. The conversational agent not only triggers reflection but also encourages explanations for partial solutions.