Toward an actualization of social intelligence in human and robot collaborative systems

As robot technology is evolving and creating a social community between humans and robots, it is necessary to research and develop a new type of intelligence, which we refer to as "social intelligence''. Social intelligence enables natural and socially appropriate interactions. Its importance is gaining a growing interest among not just the human-computer interaction researchers but also robot technology researchers and developers. This article discusses the definition, importance, and benefits of social intelligence in human and robot collaborative systems. The virtual social environment is employed to implement an experimental social intelligence system because of its low cost and high flexibility. Software robots (i.e. agents) with the social intelligence model have been implemented by featuring an emotion model and a personality model under the virtual environment. The social intelligence model that handles affective responses is based on the theories of personality, emotion, and human-media interaction such as cognitive appraisal theory and media equation. The experiment was conducted with the virtual learning collaborative system to examine the effect of the social intelligence model in the collaborative system. The data showed that the users had more positive impressions about the usefulness and the application and learning experience when the cooperative agent displayed some social responses with personality and emotions. It should be noted here that the cooperative agent did not provide any explicit assistance for the human user such as giving clues and showing answers, and yet the user's evaluation on the usefulness of the learning system was influenced by the social agent. The data also suggested that the cooperative agent contributed to the effectiveness of the learning system.