Grand challenge problems on cross cultural communication -Toward socially intelligent agents-

Abstract

The stage is set for studying cultural influences on human-human, human-agent and agent-agent communications. So far much attention has been paid to create adaptive agents which have adaptive user interface or flexible capability to communicate with another software agents. However little effort has been made for examining cultural influence in communications. I believe that as in the human-human communication, the cultural issues are unavoidable even in the communications conducted by software agents. “Socially intelligent agent”, which can adapt itself to fill such cultural gaps between the parties involved in the communication, needs to identify the difference in forms of social interactions. This paper raises six grand challenge problems on cross cultural communication that CIA community should jointly tackle in creating such socially intelligent agents.