Intimately intelligent virtual agents: knowing the human beyond sensory input

Despite being in the era of Big Data, where our devices seem to anticipate and feed our every desire, intelligent virtual agents appear to lack intimate and important knowledge of their user. Current cognitive agent architectures usually include situation awareness that allows agents to sense their environment, including their human partner, and provide congruent empathic behaviours. Depending on the framework, agents may exhibit their own personality, culture, memories, goals and reasoning styles. However, tailored adaptive behaviours based on multi-dimensional and deep understanding of the human essential for enduring beneficial relationships in certain contexts are lacking. In this paper, examples are provided of what an agent may need to know about the human in the application domains of education, health and cybersecurity and the challenges around agent adaptation and acquisition of relevant data and knowledge.