Agent Culture

Vienna Workshop
August 24 - 25, 2001
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria

Out of the broad range of questions raised by the research project"An Inquiry into the Cultural Context of the Design and Use ofSynthetic Actors", commissioned by the Austrian Federal Ministry forEducation, Science and Culture (BMBWK, GZ 21.074/1-III/A/3/99), wehave chosen the issue of cross-cultural communication as the themefor this workshop. This issue is of immediate relevance to agentresearchers and designers, as they progressively extend agents'capabilities to include nonverbal communication and models ofpersonality and emotions. At the same time, studies of cross-culturalcommunication and especially its difficulties have always offered theopportunity to raise awareness of one's own cultural backgroundwhich, in normal circumstances, remains implicit. The workshopfocused on questions such as:

• Should embodied agents be "cross-culturally portable", or will they exist in their own global agent culture?
• Which cultural analyses and considerations enter into interaction, personality, visual design and context of embodied agents?

This workshop was a first tour d'horizon of research results andpositions, but even more of open questions in the domain of "agentculture". The participants spent two days in intensive discussionsand concluded unanimously that they would stay in contact and pursuethe issue in the future.