Am I Bovvered? Fifteen Years Of Empathic Agents

In 2001, the EU-funded project VICTEC pioneered the concept of an Empathic Agent. This was reported at AAMAS in 2004 in a well-cited paper 'Caring for Agents and Agents that Care: Building Empathic Relations with Synthetic Agents' (Paiva, Dias, Sobral, Aylett, Sobreperez, Woods, Zoll, Hall). It advanced two goals for embodied empathic agents: characters that, by their actions and behaviours, are able to show empathy (or not) for other characters; and characters that, by their appearance, situation, and behaviour, are able to trigger empathic reactions in the user. In this talk we discuss how far Embodied Empathic Agents - whether graphical or robotic - are succeeding; what we can now do, and what open research questions remain. What are the key theoretical and technological advances already made and which are still needed? What applications are Empathic Agents `good' for, and how do we know they are? And how do they relate to the broader field of social agents?