Much of the research in the field of virtual coaching agents focuses on interactions between a single agent and the user of the application. Another approach could be to give each user a personal virtual coaching team. This makes it possible to present multiple perspectives, and to have coaches with different expertise debate with each other. This could make the content presented more engaging and the system more persuasive. However, currently guidelines and theory to base designs for content for virtual coaching teams on is scarce. In this paper we present a study in which we set out to design content for a virtual coaching team to talk about general health topics with older adults. We based the content for our study on our implementation of two different models from social psychology used to classify interactive behaviour: the Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) and Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) models. After testing our implementation of the models with a pilot test, we conducted an online study with 242 older adult participants. We compared the content modelled using the IPA model to the content modelled using the IPC model. For the IPA modelled content compared to the IPC modelled content the virtual coaching team came across more positively, the quality of their coaching was perceived to be better, the interaction experience was rated as better, their ability to persuade was better, and their group cohesion (task and social cohesion) was perceived to be better. We conclude that the IPA model is preferred over the IPC model when designing health coaching content for virtual coaching teams, and discuss possible reasons why. Furthermore, we recommend designers of health coaching content to test other models to base content designs on, and to measure the impact of differently modelled content in both more and less sophisticated coaching systems.

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications. The new platform provides developers with a set of integrated components in a sense-remember-think-act architecture. Integrated components are a sensor framework, memory component, Topic Selection Engine, interaction manager (Flipper), two dialogue execution engines, and two behaviour realisers (ASAP and GRETA) of which the agents can seamlessly interact with each other. This article discusses the platform and its individual components. It also highlights some of the novelties that arise from the integration of components and elaborates on directions for future work.

Language resources for studying doctor–patient interaction are rare, primarily due to the ethical issues related to recording real medical consultations. Rarer still are resources that involve more than one healthcare professional in consultation with a patient, despite many chronic conditions requiring multiple areas of expertise for effective treatment. In this paper, we present the design, construction and output of the Patient Consultation Corpus , a multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient portrayed by an actor, and at least two healthcare professionals with different areas of expertise. As well as the transcribed text from each consultation, the corpus also contains audio and video where for each consultation: the audio consists of individual tracks for each participant, allowing for clear identification of speakers; the video consists of two framings for each participant—upper-body and face—allowing for close analysis of behaviours and gestures. Having presented the design and construction of the corpus, we then go on to briefly describe how the multi-modal nature of the corpus allows it to be analysed from several different perspectives.

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications.

Multi-perspective group persuasion by virtual characters has the potential to improve behaviour change support systems by making them more persuasive, satisfying to use, and effective at achieving value-added user outcomes. In this paper, we present a study into multi-perspective persuasion by a coaching team of virtual characters, in which we tried to investigate the effects of inter-coach discussion on multi-perspective persuasion on the topic of weight loss. We investigated the effects of inter-coach discussion during a coaching session with respect to the perception of the coaches, and their ability to coach. We compared two conditions. In one condition the coaches merely gave tips, and in the other they had brief discussions in between the tips. We used questionnaires, and held interviews to gain more insight on the perception of the council, and to determine whether commitment to tips changed due to inter-coach discussion. We found a minor difference in perception of the council between the conditions. We did not find perceived coaching ability to differ. Participants had a preference for the inter-coach discussion when they noticed the difference between conditions. There was a minor influence of inter-coach discussion on reflection on which approach to choose and why. There was a small increase in commitment to advice when inter-coach discussion had taken place. Finally, feedback from the interviews indicated the type of discussion the coaches have, influences how the participants perceived it. We conclude that inter-coach discussion between agents during group interaction, when noticed, is preferred by people. We also suggest that well-designed and pretested persuasive group discussion dialogues performed by virtual agents could have an effect on changing the opinions people have.

This paper presents progress and challenges in developing a platform for multi-character, argumentation based, interaction with a group of virtual coaches for healthcare advice and promotion of healthy behaviours. Several challenges arise in the development of such a platform, e.g., choosing the most effective way of utilising argumentation between the coaches with multiple perspectives, handling the presentation of these perspectives and finally, the personalisation and adaptation of the platform to the user types. In this paper, we present the three main challenges recognized, and show how we aim to address these.

The use of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) in the domain of lifestyle coaching has been the subject of many studies in the last decades. With ageing populations in many countries, the pressure on healthcare systems is increasing. ECAs can be a potential tool to help combat this pressure through the promotion of a healthier lifestyle among older adults, as well as through coaching and counselling of older adults on how to manage their health. Designing more lifelike and engaging ECAs is of key importance to further this goal, as this could help encourage self-disclosure by the users towards the ECAs, could make the ECAs more persuasive, and could increase engagement and enjoyment of the interactions by the users, among other things. The Council of Coaches project aims to provide users with virtual coaching done by several lifestyle coaching agents with different domains of expertise as well as varying backstories, personalities, mannerisms, motivations and looks, among other things. To work towards this goal, work has been done on character and personality design for an initial set of lifestyle coaching agents and defined initial interaction scenarios. These were inspired by literature on coaching and ECAs, videos of interactions between healthcare professionals and patient actors, conversations with healthcare professionals, and brainstorming sessions. This paper presents the work done within the project thus far and closes out by presenting our plans to address the question: What are the possible advantages and disadvantages of a multiple agent approach as compared to a single agent approach to coaching interactions with older adults?

We demonstrate here the first Technical Demonstrator for Council of Coaches a project that is aiming to deploy a platform for virtual health coaching, and will incorporate computational models of argument and dialogue.

A method is described that is suitable for the numerical generation of boundary-conforming curvilinear coordinate systems. The method is based on the decomposition of a multiply connected domain into a number of simply connected zones. In each zone the grid is computed by solving a system of Euler equations that minimizes a functional of the unknown transformation functions. This system of equations and the natural boundary conditions of the minimization problem are discussed. A first Illustration of this technique is given for the case of a three-element airfoil.

At present the stage is reached that approximate transonic flow calculations can be performed for arbitrary lifting wings and moderately complicated wing-fuselage combinations, using relaxation type finite difference techniques. Most methods use transonic small perturbation theory, but differ already in model equation. The classical Guderley-Von Karman equation has been used extensively (NASA Ames, Dornier). Different second order terms were included by Lomax, Bailey and Ballhaus of NASA Ames (Ref. 1) and by Albone, Hall and Joyce of RAE (Ref. 3). Newman and Klunker of NASA Langley (Ref. 2) have added one additional third order term.

A design method for transonic shock-free aerofoils using hodograph theory is sketched. The method is based on the approximate solution of Tricomi boundary value problems for the elliptic-hyperbolic hodograph equations of transonic aerofoil flows on a two-sheeted hodograph surface. Special attention is paid to a numerical approximation method generating nearly always closed aerofoils. The use of the computer programs in an aerodynamic design process is illustrated by an example. Several examples of computed aerofoils (some of them advanced) demonstrate that the method is flexible and powerful.

A design method for transonic shock-free aerofoils using analytic hodograph theory is sketched. A user-oriented outline of the program system that has been developed is presented. A number of examples of computed aerofoils show that the performance of the program system seems to be sifficient for advanced transonic shock-free aerofoil design.

An approxinate m ethod is presented for the mapping of simply - connected closed regions bounded by a smooth ourve onto a circular disk using harmonic polymials. Due attention is being paid to the handling of the singularities that usually disturb the regularity of the mapping near the boundary of the region. Some numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the method.