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Environmental monitoring and emergency response projects in urban-industrial areas increasingly rely on efficient collaboration between experts in control rooms and at incident locations, and citizens who live or work in the area. In the video accompanying this abstract we present a system that uses distributed sensor technology, Bayesian decision tools, and advanced map-based interfaces to facilitate collaboration between environmental experts and the public for environmental monitoring and early detection of chemical incidents.

We present ongoing research concerning the interaction between users and environmental agencies through autonomous mobile agents in the environmental monitoring domain. The overarching EU FP7 project DIADEM, concerns the development of a system that detects potentially hazardous situations in populated areas using input from both a distributed sensor network and humans through their mobile devices. We propose a model of interaction with a system where concerned citizens communicate with a social virtual agent through their mobile phone to inform the environmental monitoring agency about unusual smells. In case of an emergency, people will receive instructions or directions for evacuation from the agent. In this paper, we review relevant literature and describe the development of a dynamic dialogue agent that supports international collaboration by adapting its social interaction to the cultural background of the humans it interacts with.

In this paper, we present ongoing research concerning the interaction between users and autonomous mobile agents in the environmental monitoring domain. The overarching project, DIADEM, deals with developing a system that detects potentially hazardous situations in populated industrial areas using input from both a distributed sensor network and humans through mobile devices. We propose a model of interaction with the gas detection system where concerned citizens communicate with a mobile agent to inform the gas monitoring system about unusual smells via their mobile phones. Next, we present a preliminary user requirements analysis based on 40 phone calls from members of the public to an environmental monitoring agency. Finally, we introduce measures to study the delicate long-term social relationship between users and the gas monitoring system.

This paper discusses our ongoing research on user interaction with autonomous mobile agents. The overarching project, DIADEM, involves the development of a (semi-)autonomous system that detects potential environmental hazards in heavily populated urban-industrial areas by using input from both a distributed sensor network and humans through their mobile devices. User experiments in this project will focus on social and affective issues in interacting with autonomous mobile agents (such as positioning of mobile agents in relation to the user, empathic interaction and user trust). We describe the project and research context for our studies.

A 2x2 enhanced Wizard-of-Oz experiment (N = 32) was conducted to compare two different approaches to presenting information to drivers in easy and difficult driving conditions. Data of driving safety, evaluation of the spoken dialogue system, and perception of self were analyzed. Results show that the user-modeled summarize-and-refine (UMSR) approach led to more efficient information retrieval than did the summarize-and-refine (SR) approach. However, depending on driving condition, higher efficiency did not always translate into pleasant subjective experience. Implications for usability testing and interface design were presented, followed by discussions of future research directions.