| NSF Org: |
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 4, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 4, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1548517 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Alexandra Medina-Borja
amedinab@nsf.gov (703)292-7557 CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $250,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $250,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3720 S FLOWER ST FL 3 LOS ANGELES CA US 90033 (213)740-7762 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
3720 S. Flower Street Los Angeles CA US 90089-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EFRI Research Projects |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
Buildings consume a staggering 38 percent of our nation's total energy use. Existing automation approaches to address this problem focus either on buildings, allowing them to better sense and respond to the behavior of their occupants, or focus on occupants, seeking to educate them on making more efficient energy choices. In contrast, this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project considers ways to enhance the interaction between buildings and occupants. The research team hypothesizes that user-building interactions will be most effective when building users establish a relationship of trust with building automation. By developing mathematical models and theory that amplify user capabilities through relational features, users are empowered to improve individual performance as well as building performance, while also improving societal well-being. To do so, the work draws on theories from the behavioral sciences to mathematically model when and how a building should interact with a user and how these interactions should be framed. The results will change the way we perceive and experience today's built environments, leading what could become the creation of unprecedented built environments that are attentive and have an identity. The project will enhance infrastructure for research and education by making the models and data available via a free research license, incorporating research findings into the engineering curriculum, disseminating research findings via publications, and national and international presentations.
The modeling framework for user-virtual human agent interactions is the key contribution to smart engineered systems modeling and design and occurs at the intersection of engineering, the behavioral sciences and computational modeling. If successful, the mathematical framework will be used to design smart buildings that have two-way interactions with people. The research objectives contribute to the ultimate goal of enabling cyber-physical systems to interact and collaborate with humans. This project integrates experimental data into the mathematical models, testing the inclusion of relational elements embedded in the personification of a building. The models will predict which response is the most suitable for a building-user interaction. This model will also be informed and constrained by existing theoretical work on persuasion. The model will account for various contextual, temporal and personal factors as well as the changes in user response due to continuous interactions with the building. The multiple-step modeling methodology incorporates a combination of machine learning techniques, mathematical projections for the classification problem, and statistical models such as Markov model, and autoregressive moving average models. In particular, the contributions are twofold: (1) modeling user-building interactions using virtual human agents personifying buildings; and (2) performing fundamental research on how theories of human interpersonal trust and influence can inform the design of automation. The research will contribute to the fundamental understanding of human-machine teamwork, including elucidating theories of why and how people build connections with automated systems and advance our general understanding of how automation exhibiting relational features can facilitate behavior change in the population served by those systems.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Buildings consume a staggering 38 percent of our nation's total energy use. Existing automation approaches to address this problem focus either on buildings, allowing them to better sense and respond to the behavior of their occupants, or focus on occupants, seeking to educate them on making more efficient energy choices. In contrast, in this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project, we hypothesized that user-building interactions will be most effective when building users establish a relationship of trust with building automation. To do so, we drew on theories from behavioral science to understand when and how a building should interact with a user through virtual-human agents and how these interactions should be framed. The results showed a significant main effect of delivery style such that participants complied more when asked for pro-environmental actions by an avatar compared to voice or text, and also more when asked using voice than text. There was also a significant main effect of persona such that participants complied more with a request made by the building facility manager rather than the building itself. In addition to delivery style and persona, we also manipulated the gender of the communicator (male vs. female). The analysis revealed a significant effect of gender such that participants were more likely to comply with the female communicator than the male communicator. These results suggest that delivery styles can influence the effectiveness of the pro-environmental requests in the context of human-building communication and support the hypothesis that participants would comply more with pro-environmental request using richer delivery style (avatar followed by voice) rather than leaner delivery style (text). The results also support the hypothesis that the persona of the communicator influences the effectiveness of the communication and suggested that more compliance would be achieved if the communicator personifies the building facility manager rather than the building itself. Additionally, the results showed that the gender of the communicator affected the effectiveness of delivery styles on increasing compliance with pro-environmental requests. Female avatar and female voice resulted in more compliance compared to the male avatar and male voice, respectively.
In addition, we examined if differences arose when virtual representations engaged respondents in a social dialog rather than a monolog. Our results showed that building manager persona evokes greater compliance than the building persona when monolog is used to encourage pro-environmental behavior. When these personas are used in conjunction with a potentially rapport-building dialog, there is no difference between conditions. Therefore, using a dialog helps bring the building persona on par with the building manger persona in terms of persuasiveness. However, these strategies were not equally effective across all types of people. For example, people with higher income were more persuaded by strategies that included either social dialog or human-like persona; people with higher level of extroversion were more motivated by social agents that represented a human-like persona and used social dialog; people with higher level of insecurity were motivated more with a social dialog; and people with higher level of innovativeness and insecurity were persuaded more when they thought they were interacting with a human (building manager). We also examined if the participant's compliance would change over time or the repetitiveness of the social dialog would decrease the ability of the system to motivate participants to perform pro-environmental actions. The results suggest that repeated interactions with the users increase the effectiveness of the interventions.
In particular, the contributions are twofold: (1) modeling user-building interactions using virtual human agents personifying buildings and building managers; and (2) performing fundamental research on how theories of human interpersonal trust and influence can inform the design of automation. The research contributed to the fundamental understanding of human-machine teamwork, including why and how people build connections with automated systems and advance our general understanding of how automation exhibiting relational features can facilitate behavior change in the population served by those systems. The research contributed to the ultimate goal of enabling cyber-physical systems to interact and collaborate with humans. The work supported the research of PhD students in computer science and civil engineering. The project enhanced infrastructure for research and education by incorporating research findings into the engineering curriculum, disseminating research findings via peer-reviewed publications, and national and international conference talks and invited presentations.
Last Modified: 03/07/2018
Modified by: Burcin Becerik-Gerber
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