Intelligent virtual agents are being endowed with empathic behaviours to perform roles such as virtual therapists. Studies often evaluate the level of rapport established, but do not measure the therapeutic benefit and the relative advantage of empathic versus neutral behaviours. We have created two virtual (empathic/neutral) therapists. Our experiment with 63 participants consisted of one within-subjects (empathic/neutral) and one between-subjects (order) factors. Regardless of the virtual therapist used, improvements in baseline emotion were reported after the first interaction (time one) and further improvement after the second interaction (time two). Our study reveals that if the human initially expresses strong emotional feeling for a problem they are facing, rapport will be higher for the empathic therapist and the level of rapport established at the first meeting will persist regardless of whether the second encounter used empathic or neutral dialogue. Conversely, participants experiencing low emotional feeling reported greater rapport with the neutral therapist, and that level of rapport persisted in the second encounter with the alternative therapist. This study shows that an empathic agent will not necessarily build more rapport or deliver better emotional outcomes than a neutral agent. Further studies are needed to determine when tailoring and complex behaviours are justified.

Despite the increase in university courses and curricula on the ethics of computing there are few studies about how computer science (CS) programs should account for the diverse ways ethical dilemmas and approaches to ethics are situated in cultural, philosophical, and governance systems, religions, and languages. We draw on the experiences and insights of 46 university educators and practitioners in Latin America, South-Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australian First Nations who participated in surveys and interviews. Our modest study seeks to prompt conversation about ethics and computing in the Global Souths and inform revisions to the Association of Computer Machinery's curricular guidelines for the Society, Ethics and Professionalism knowledge area in undergraduate CS programs. Participants describe frictions between static and anticipatory approaches to ethics in globalised regulations and formal codes of ethics and professional conduct and local practices, values, and impacts of technologies in the Global Souths. Codes and regulations are instruments for international control and their gap with local realities can cause harm, despite local efforts to compensate. However, our insights also illustrate opportunities for university teaching to link more closely to priorities, actions, and experiences in the Global Souths and enrich students’ education in the Global North.

It is possible to develop a well-sustained society by balancing social, technical, and environmental concerns at the community level. Indigenous governance methods provide enormous prospects for developing well-sustained societies. A limitation is the knowledge gap and lack of interest from dominant cultures. With the application of appropriate technology in development, it is possible for Indigenous communities to adjust technology to their uses and transfer their accumulated knowledge to the development of infrastructure and mechanisms for production incorporating cultural value. Activating such talents within the Indigenous community is important for enabling them to achieve their ideal future. Using participatory design methods, Indigenous people can be brought into the development planning to understand the key variables that limit and influence technology development. System dynamic modelling can be adapted to simulate these new attributes and develop plans and objectives based on outcomes from the model. An example is shown around a case study for community development in Papua, Indonesia. This research is to establish a long-term development plan for all stakeholders, while preserving the value of the Indigenous culture. An analysis of Indigenous social behavioral patterns toward development provides an idea of social-constructive values, which will allow Indigenous community to develop self-sustainable and independent communities.

This paper presents the lessons learnt during the analysis of the corporate databases developed by IBM Global Services (Australia). IBM is rated as CMM level 5. Following CMM level 4 and above practices, IBM designed several software metrics databases with associated data collection and reporting systems to manage its corporate goals. However, IBM quality staff believed the data were not as useful as they had expected. NICTA staff undertook a review of IBM's statistical process control procedures and found problems with the databases mainly due to a lack of links between the different data tables. Such problems might be avoided by using M3P variant of the GQM paradigm to define a hierarchy of goals, with project goals at the lowest level, then process goals and corporate goals at the highest level. We propose using E-R models to identify problems with existing databases and to design databases once goals have been defined.

Purpose: This chapter outlines the successful community engagement process used by the authors for the Kinship Online project in the context of Indigenous methodological, epistemological, and ethical considerations. It juxtaposes Indigenous and western ways of teaching and research, exploring in greater detail the differences between them. The following chapter builds on and extends Riley, Howard-Wagner, Mooney & Kutay (2013, in press) to delve deeply into the importance of embedding Aboriginal cultural knowledge in curriculum at the university level. Practical implications: The chapter gives an account of an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLTC) grant to develop Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching and Sharing Resources (the Kinship Online Project). The project is built on an existing face-to-face interactive presentation based on Australian Aboriginal Kinship systems created by Lynette Riley, which is being re-developed as an online cultural education workshop. Value: A key consideration of the researchers has been Aboriginal community engagement in relation to the design and development of the project. The chapter delves deeply into the importance of embedding Aboriginal cultural knowledge into curriculum at the university level. In doing so, the chapter sets out an Aboriginal community engagement model compared with a western research model which the authors hope will be useful to other researchers who wish to engage in research with Aboriginal people and/or communities.

Virtual agents that improve the lives of humans need to be more than user-aware and adaptive to the user’s current state and behavior. Additionally, they need to apply expertise gained from experience that drives their adaptive behavior based on deep understanding of the user’s features (such as gender, culture, personality, and psychological state). Our work has involved extension of FAtiMA (Fearnot AffecTive Mind Architecture) with the addition of an Adaptive Engine to the FAtiMA cognitive agent architecture. We use machine learning to acquire the agent’s expertise by capturing a collection of user profiles into a user model and development of agent expertise based on the user model. In this paper, we describe a study to evaluate the Adaptive Engine, which compares the benefit (i.e., reduced stress, increased rapport) of tailoring dialogue to the specific user (Adaptive group) with dialogues that are either empathic (Empathic group) or neutral (Neutral group). Results showed a significant reduction in stress in the empathic and neutral groups, but not the adaptive group. Analyses of rule accuracy, participants’ dialogue preferences, and individual differences reveal that the three groups had different needs for empathic dialogue and highlight the importance and challenges of getting the tailoring right.