terminhell
@terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 2 weeks ago:
The article:
A specialized chatbot named Noora is helping individuals with autism spectrum disorder practice their social skills on demand.
Knowing what to say when co-workers tell you about their weekend is a social skill that many take for granted, but for some individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this social interaction can be challenging. Struggling to find the correct response in social situations like these can negatively impact social and professional relationships for people with ASD, and can worsen co-occurring conditions like depression.
Research has shown that practicing social interactions with professionals in a clinical face-to-face intervention can improve outcomes for individuals, but these solutions are often costly or not widely available. Lynn Koegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, in collaboration with Professor Monica Lam from Stanford’s Computer Science Department, are the authors of recent research published by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that investigates the role of AI in filling this gap.
“Our research has shown that face-to-face work does help with social conversation … so we wanted to see if we could translate that into computer use,” said Koegel. “Accessibility is really important because a lot of people don’t have access to a face-to-face provider and the providers can be really expensive.”
Introducing Noora In this work, funded in part by a seed grant from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the Kind World Foundation, Koegel and colleagues evaluated interactions between participants with ASD who struggle with social interactions and Noora, a chatbot built with a large language model (LLM).
In one-on-one interactions, which can be written or spoken, Noora offers individualized guidance on a number of social communication scenarios; it helps users learn to ask questions, give compliments, respond empathically, and with other areas of social communication that are often challenging.
In this recent work, Koegel focused on the impact of Noora’s empathy module. The chatbot first offers a leading statement, such as “I’m feeling really tired lately and it’s been so hard to concentrate,” and then asks the user to assess whether the statement is positive, neutral, or negative. Noora will then grade this response and ask the user to respond empathically to the initial statement. Based on whether the user successfully responds with empathy, Noora either offers a gentle correction or validates a correct response.
The research team carefully crafted prompts with representative examples to ensure that the answers are appropriate. To interact with users, Noora needed to know three things: what kind of statements warrant an empathic response, how to assess whether a user has responded empathetically, and how to offer a user helpful feedback to improve the response if it lacked empathy.
To craft leading statements, the team exposed Noora to “golden” responses and to inappropriate responses. The team both wrote responses themselves and used the LLM to write other responses that they then verified, creating a pool of 330 statements designed to elicit empathetic responses from participants. This means that Noora was never creating leading statements on the fly, which could have potentially led to inappropriate questions.
When it came to responding live to users’ empathetic responses, Noora had freer rein. Taking advantage of the LLM’s abilities for in-context learning, the team simulated users’ personalities and had Noora practice responding to users that showed varying levels of empathy. They also selected difficult cases and provided feedback for Noora to learn from.
An example of the NOORA interface and a sample of an interaction.
Putting Noora to the Test To see how well Noora stacked up against treatment as usual, Koegel, Lam, and colleagues conducted a randomized trial with 30 participants in which half were assigned to use Noora for four weeks and half received no intervention. Participants using Noora were asked to complete 10 trials per day, five days a week for a total of 200 trials.
Ultimately, Koegel said, the team was looking to evaluate whether Noora could improve users’ empathetic responses and if improvements could be generalized to show empathy in human-to-human communication as well.
“There’s a lot of AI research out there that shows that the ASD students improve using a program, but doesn’t show that it generalizes to real life,” said Koegel. “So that was our main goal.”
Comparing responses from the start of the experiment to the end, Koegel said that 71 percent of participants improved their number of empathetic responses when using Noora.
To see whether this progress could generalize, the team had participants take part in a Zoom call with a team member before and after the experiment, which included leading empathic statements. When reassessed after the intervention, the experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group with an average increase of 38 percent, while the control groups pre- and post-scores were similar. This shows that just four weeks of using the AI program significantly improved verbal empathetic responses.
With this success under Noora’s belt, Koegel and Lam are now interested in testing the effectiveness of other modules as well. They’re also working to open Noora for beta testing for public use and in clinical settings.
Beyond Noora, Koegel said she’s also incorporating AI into other aspects of her autism research as well, including motivational treatment for children with ASD who are in the beginning stages of using communication.
“I’d like to take a lot of the work that I’ve done over the decades that’s face-to-face and see how much we can translate to AI,” said Koegel. “Since kids really like the computer, we want to see if instead of just spending time on their computer or iPhone we can create a learning experience.”
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to [deleted] | 10 comments
- Comment on Modern Windows in a nutshell 4 weeks ago:
Download pro, during install before setting initial account: shift+f10 (may have to hold fn key if laptop). When the cmd box opens type oobe\bypassnro hit enter an PC reboots. Disconnect networking. Say I don’t have internet. Now you can do local accounts.
- Comment on Pretty Girl Horse Racing Game 'Uma Musume' Is Engrossing And Weird As Hell | Aftermath 2 months ago:
Misread the title - thought it said gross and weird
- Comment on Pretty Girl Horse Racing Game 'Uma Musume' Is Engrossing And Weird As Hell | Aftermath 2 months ago:
Don’t play it? Who cares? Ya it’s kinda weird, ill never play it or install it. That’s that, why try shaming people for stuff like this?
- Comment on Just trying to scan my TPS reports 2 months ago:
It does, naps was a last ditch effort. Unfortunately the clients software requires twain support =\
- Submitted 2 months ago to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world | 31 comments
- Comment on US Politicians praying inside the House of Representatives 2 months ago:
- Comment on Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening 2 months ago:
Another cautionary tale for 3-2-1
- Comment on Gooner game of the year Stellar Blade's mods are 41% smut, ensuring gamers will never see the light of heaven 3 months ago:
And this is a problem, why? Mods are from the community. It’s what they want to add or change in the game. You could probably get similar numbers for a lot of games.
Hell, forget Nexus, look at lovers lab (or don’t if you wanna stay pure lol).
- Comment on How Relooted, A Game About Reclaiming African Artifacts From Western Museums, Ended Up Being Shown By A White Guy At Summer Game Fest 3 months ago:
I’m not saying it’s right, or fixes past evils…but can we stop pretending the modern US have been the only ones that have ever done evil shit? At this point it feels more like crying wolf for the sins of our fathers. Every country, every era has dirty laundry.
- Comment on Autumn Gorge Cascade 3 months ago:
Reminds me of Guild Wars 1 art style.
- Comment on “Yay! We made our project objectively worse!” 3 months ago:
They don’t crisp without the sleeve. Recently bought a box and was confused at first.
Oh well, just like most other things, to the little oven it goes.
- Comment on Questions about The Sims 4 months ago:
Base game is free now. Beyond that, unless she mentions any dlc by name, this is the situation for a steam gift card. The game itself promotes other dlc on launch. The content varies a lot in terms of price and amount of included content. The bigger ones (non-sale) are about $40 USD. Down to about $5 for the small ones. Pretty sure a decent sale is going right now too.
- Comment on World’s First ‘Splashless’ Urinal keeps the Floor Clean and your Pants Pee-free - Yanko Design 4 months ago:
This isn’t new? I’ve seen splash less and no water, or both for years now.
- Comment on Adult gamers of Lemmy how do you find time to game without being exhausted of the screen? 5 months ago:
Lol…you don’t! Welcome to adulthood and having real world responsibilities. For me it’s turned into maybe 1-2hrs a night at best. Weekends I can sometimes get a bit more in.
- Comment on Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it 5 months ago:
Why not use capacitors instead of lithium? Sure they won’t hold a charge nearly as long, but they also charge in a fraction of the time too.
- Comment on TikTok now lets parents see their teen's follower/following list, block access during certain hours 6 months ago:
Hey kid, give me the phone…glance through followers.
Cool.
Why are we trying to turn parents into spies. Just talk to your kids. Check the devices on occasion. Check them anyways for shady apps or signs of malware. Phones are computers that happen to fit in the hand and has a sim.
- Comment on Block ADS On The Internet For Your Entire Family 6 months ago:
I’ve been running it for a few years now. Lots of custom lists. Got about 2.2 million domains blocked ATM. I’ve had to make a few exceptions and do some manual tweaks. The recent update to 6.0+ also gives quite the performance boost too while adding a few things that were lacking.
- Comment on The Echoing Abyss 6 months ago:
In the right deck it would be great
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
Vikings were successful with other countries women cuz they did basic hygiene. Shaved, washed, some hair stuff. They ‘conquered’ just from cleanliness. If Vikings aren’t manly enough idk what this kid is on about lol.
- Comment on Perfectly clear instructions HP 7 months ago:
Ya, hindsight it’s a dumb comparison.
- Comment on Perfectly clear instructions HP 7 months ago:
For sure. Plenty of times I’ve had to go power cycle a little desk printer just for it to work again. Oddly, commercial label printers (like TSC) have been surprisingly ok, even in large industrial shops.
- Comment on Perfectly clear instructions HP 7 months ago:
Maybe it’s the environments I work in, but WiFi printing always ends in tragedy.
- Submitted 7 months ago to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world | 18 comments
- Comment on Hidden razor blades 10 months ago:
In high humidity regions, ya. I’ve never had issue with razors specifically, but other items.
- Comment on Go fuck yourself, Mike 10 months ago:
So, once times?
- Comment on A bank referred me to their website to get more details about their products... 11 months ago:
When a bank gives you cookies, ya find a new bank.
- Comment on From The Foremost Ape in JavaScript 11 months ago:
Seems legit
- Comment on 63% of Gen Z Would Rather Play Video Games Than Watch a Movie 11 months ago:
Basically the same reason as my reply to above reply. But in short, you’re right. AAA games basically = trash now (rare exceptions probably).
