Engineering Personal and Social Affective Applications.

摘要

Affective (i.e., emotional) applications are becoming increasingly mainstream in entertainment and education. Yet, current techniques for building such applications are limited, and the maintenance and use of affect is in essence handcrafted in each application. The Koko architecture describes middleware that takes away the burden of incorporating affect into applications, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications.;However, Koko can be effective only if the models it needs to function are suitably constructed. To this end, we have developed Kokomo, a methodology for creating affective applications. Specifically, it incorporates expressive communicative acts, and uses them to guide the design of an affective application. We empirically evaluate Kokomo's utility through a developer study. The results are positive and demonstrate that the developers who used Kokomo, in conjunction with Koko, were able to develop an affective application in less time, with fewer lines of code, and with a reduced perception of difficulty than developers who worked without Kokomo.;To affective applications, Koko makes two contributions: improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; and yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible. To agent-oriented software engineering, Kokomo con tributes a methodology that incorporates expressives, which are largely ignored in conventional approaches, thus expanding the scope of AOSE to affective applications.;Further, we describe booST and hooPS, two applications built using Koko, which are targeted toward the youth demographic. These mobile, social applications are designed with the goals of promoting health and well-being by engendering and strengthening social relationships among youth. What makes booST and hooPS stand out is that they exhibit sensitivity to their user's affective state and support the user in exchanging that state with other users. In this manner, these applications demonstrate how representing and reasoning about affect can facilitate deeper relationships that promote desirable behaviors and attitudes.