An Implementation of Socially-Intelligent Agents providing Emotional Support and its Application

In this paper, we propose a software platform for realizing applications using socially-intelligent agents. Socially-intelligent agents are software agents which employ social intelligence. Although there exist many types of social intelligence, we focus on a type of social intelligence for providing emotional support. Applying the type of social intelligence, our socially-intelligent agents behave like people by simulating social behavior of people. We show how we realize the socially-intelligent agents through an explanation on the conceptual architecture of our software platform. We also show the mechanism for generating social behavior which makes our software platform unique. According to the theory of media equation, we expected socially-intelligent agents will cause good effect for users. To justify our expectation, we implemented an application of our socially-intelligent agents for eLearning. We give explanation about the application and how socially-intelligent agents work in it. We also discuss our ideas on social intelligence and show our direction for future works.