Policy-based Recommendations in a Flow Choice Architecture

Human agents that are involved in work activities employ their attention and decision making resources in exchange for experiences and rewards that may be physically, socially, economically and emotionally valued. When the human agent attains the flow state during work, their perception of physical effort diminishes, and their perception of emotional rewards increases.

In this work, we develop a computational model called the flow choice architecture, and simulate different approaches to policy-based utility-maximization using targeted choice recommendations. The results demonstrate a flow choice architecture that provides timely nudges to human agents in order to establish and maintain the flow state in a way that increases their productivity and sense of work accomplishment.

Neurofeedback Humanoid to Support Deep Work

High performance is desired in the workplace, even with swarms of robots on their way in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Our research focuses on the population of knowledge workers, who are typically expected to sit in one space for extended periods while performing deep, intellectual and creative work. For those who work predominantly using computers, there is growing scope to augment task performance using artificial virtual agents. This trend is evident in the adoption of voice-based, and gesture-based applications that allow users to issue vocal or gestural commands while their hands are occupied on primary tasks. Even though multimodal interaction may yield more productivity than solely mouse and keyboard interactions, it may still impose a significant cognitive load on the user.

We propose the modeling of a smart motivational humanoid assistant that is personalized to interact with human users without explicit commands, and instead via wireless sensors that can perceive the operator’s brain activity. The humanoid engages with the human using effective nudges through neurofeedback.

Weekes, T. R., & Eskridge, T. C. (2020, May). A neurofeedback-driven humanoid to support deep work. In Proceedings of the 33rd Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics (pp. 14-16).