Autonomous Interactive Intermediaries
Stefan Marti, Chris Schmandt

Why do our advanced cell phones still ring at completely inappropriate times? This project explores ways to make mobile communication devices socially intelligent, both in their internal reasoning and in how they interact with people.

We have built an Autonomous Interactive Intermediary, a software and robotic agent that helps the user manage her mobile communication devices by, for example, harvesting social intelligence from close by human and non-human sources.

The Intermediary is embodied in two domains: as a conversational agent, it is able to converse with caller and callee, mediating between them, and possibly suggesting modality crossovers; as an animatronic device, it uses socially strong non-verbal cues like gaze, posture, and gestures, to alert and notify the user and co-located people in a subtle but public way.

The Intermediary detects conversations to determine social groupings (Conversation Finder), tries to evaluate the importance of incoming communication, invites input from the local others, while also consulting memory of previous interactions stored in the location.

Cellular Squirrel website


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