Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2019

Abstract

Agents have gained popularity nowadays as virtual assistants and companions of their human users supporting daily activities in many aspects of personal life. Designed to be sociable, an agent engages its user(s) to communicate and even develop friendships. Rather than just as a lifeless toy, it is supposed to be perceived as an individual with its own personality, experiences, and social life. In this paper, we seek to highlight self-hood as another dimension that characterizes an agent. Besides levels of autonomy and reasoning, an agent can be defined based on its capacity to process and reflect on its own self as an individual that possesses identity, embodiment, mind (mental), social relationship with others, and experiences comprising memories about the past and future prospects. We argue that this self-awareness is necessary for a companion agent to engage seamlessly with people as a real actual individual. Some existing implementations and models from preliminary works on agent's self-awareness illustrate the feasibility and challenges to realize this concept. Beyond assistance and companionship, we also envisage that this model of self is applicable to other types of autonomous application and system involving extensive interaction with people potentially tackling moral and ethical issues.

Keywords

Autonomy, Self-awareness, Social cognition

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019, Montreal, Canada, May 13-17

Volume

3

First Page

1654

Last Page

1658

ISBN

9781510892002

Identifier

10.5555/3306127.3331892

Publisher

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)

City or Country

Montreal, Canada

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