Towards Human-Aware Epistemic Planning For Promoting Behavior-Change

This paper introduces an approach to human-aware epistemicplanning in which a rational intelligent agent plans its actionsfor encouraging a human to proceed in a social virtual real-ity (VR) environment. In order to persuade the human user toexecute specific actions, the agent adapts the virtual environ-ment by adjusting motivators in the environment. The agent’smodel of the human is based on the theory of planned behav-ior (TPB), a cognitive theory to explain and predict humanbehavior. The intelligent agent manipulates the environment,a process where the agent conducts epistemic actions, i.e.,adapting the environment and observing human responses, inorder to understand the human’s behavior and encourage hu-man actions. An action reasoning framework is introducedthat defines transitions between goal-oriented human activi-ties in the virtual scenario. The proposed human-aware plan-ning architecture can also be applied in environments that arenot virtual, by utilizing modern mobile devices which havebuilt-in sensors that measure motion, orientation, and variousenvironmental conditions