Sociocultural intelligence and intelligent agents

Designing of advanced intelligent system such as the Species agent model, to reflect sociocultural awareness and intelligence, is discussed. In this model, sociocultural awareness can be conceptualized as the rules of the agent's knowledge base and can be embedded in the agent at its instantiation, and the agent can adapt them over time. The operating environment of these socioculturally aware agents consists of human behavior in a real-world environment, which is stochastic, continuous, dynamic, and difficult to succinctly represent to a computer. The socially intelligent responses that are delivered by the Species agent include messages of thanks and praise and that offered to help and described the system's capabilities. Experiments are also conducted in which the guise of an agent is systematically altered, its nonverbal demeanor or emotional state is manipulated, and its naturalness in accomplishing routine turntaking is gauged with real human interlocutors.