This paper explores the potential of conversational intermediary AI (CIAI) between patients and healthcare providers, focusing specifically on promoting healthier lifestyles for Type 2 diabetes. CIAI aims to address the constraint of limited healthcare provider time by acting as an intermediary in-between infrequent consultations. CIAI enables healthcare providers to understand patients better and offer personalized support. Through an exploratory focus group with healthcare domain experts, we gather insights into CIAI’s envisioned in diabetes care. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of CIAI in diabetes care.@en

Behavior change support systems need to take into account individual needs and preferences to provide appropriate support. In this demonstration, we illustrate how this might be achieved through the explicit modeling of user characteristics within knowledge graphs (KG), captured in a dialogue between the system and the user. We demonstrate how up-to-date information enables reasoning for providing personalized support.@en

For personal assistive technologies to effectively support users, they need a user model that records information about the user, such as their goals, values, and context. Knowledge-based techniques can model the relationships between these concepts, enabling the support agent to act in accordance with the user's values. However, user models require updating over time to accommodate changes and continuously align with what the user deems important. In our work, we propose and investigate the use of human-agent alignment dialogues for establishing whether user model updates are needed and acquiring the necessary information for these updates. In this paper, we perform an exploratory qualitative focus group study in which we investigate participants' opinions about written examples of alignment dialogues, as a foundation for their design. Transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. A main theme that emerged concerns the potential impact of agent utterances on the user's feelings about themselves and about the agent.

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This project proposes a different way of looking at AI alignment, namely by introducing AI Alignment Dialogues. We argue that alignment dialogues have a number of advantages in comparison to data-driven approaches, especially for behaviour support agents, which aim to support users in achieving their desired future behaviours rather than their current behaviours. The advantages of alignment dialogues include allowing the users to directly convey higher-level concepts to the agent and making the agent more transparent and trusted.

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