3 papers
cs.CL2025
A Risk Ontology for Evaluating AI-Powered Psychotherapy Virtual Agents
Ian Steenstra, Timothy W. Bickmore
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Intelligent Virtual Agents acting as psychotherapists presents significant opportunities for expanding mental healthcare acces…
cs.HC2025
Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations
Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Timothy W. Bickmore
Learning therapeutic counseling involves significant role-play experience with mock patients, with current manual training methods providing only intermittent granular feedback. We…
cs.HC2024
Virtual Agent-Based Communication Skills Training to Facilitate Health Persuasion Among Peers
Farnaz Nouraei, Keith Rebello, Mina Fallah +6
Many laypeople are motivated to improve the health behavior of their family or friends but do not know where to start, especially if the health behavior is potentially stigmatizing…