Print Email Facebook Twitter An Empathic Virtual Buddy for Social Support Title An Empathic Virtual Buddy for Social Support Author Van der Zwaan, J.M. Contributor Jonker, C.M. (promotor) Dignum, M.V. (promotor) Faculty Technology, Policy and Management Department Infrastructure Systems & Services Date 2014-03-10 Abstract Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as companions or coaches. These roles are typically performed by humans and require exhibiting certain social behaviors, such as providing social support. For interactions between users and coaching or companion ECAs to become truly social, providing social support is one of the tasks these agents should be able to perform. Social support can be defined as alleviating the emotional distress of another person. This thesis proposes a design for an 'empathic virtual buddy' that provides social support to victims of cyberbullying. It presents the underlying principles and an architecture for a prototype system, and provides both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the support conveyed by the empathic virtual buddy prototype. Subject Embodied Conversational Agentspedagogical, companion and coaching agentsverbal and non-verbal expressionsocial supportcyberbullying To reference this document use: https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:f32371b2-82cc-414e-9569-2d56b12a530a ISBN 9789461862792 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type doctoral thesis Rights (c) 2014 Van der Zwaan, J.M. Files PDF jvdzwaan_phd_thesis.pdf 3.81 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:f32371b2-82cc-414e-9569-2d56b12a530a/datastream/OBJ/view