Dr Paul Piwek

We are writing to give you an indicative level for your EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) funding due to be awarded by the end of the year. The EPSRC DTP offers flexible support for doctoral students and complements our other training routes: Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) and Industrial CASE. Investing in excellent doctoral training continues to be a high priority for us as set out in our new Strategic Delivery Plan expected to be published in June 2019. This DTP award is a two year allocation which will fund doctoral students starting in 2020/21 and 2021/22. Your university has been successful in the allocation and the level of your provisional allocation is £698960.

In pair programming, two people work together on the same problem, collaboratively writing code (in a shared window or screen) whilst communicating with each other (via voice or text, face-to-face or remotely). Pair programming is used by professional software developers (Goth, 2016) and has also been shown to help beginning programmers improve their skills. For example, McDowell et al. (2002) found that pair programming increases retention and helps students become better programmers. Also, pair programming was found particularly beneficial for women, helping them persist in computer science (Werner, 2004). The practicalities involved in setting up pair programming sessions can be a barrier to adopting it, both in professional and educational settings (especially distance learning settings). The proposed research explores the use of chatbots to address this issue. Chatbots are dialogue systems that respond to users questions and requests with natural language responses. Task-oriented chatbots are used in business applications while open-domain chatbots are used for entertainment. Katz et al. (2014) explore use of chatbots in an education task. Our work will advance dialogue systems research by applying it in the context of pair programming. Research topic and approach Building on the research strengths in dialogue modelling, question generation, pair programming and multi-modality at the OU and Toshiba, we propose to develop and investigate an AI buddy for pair programming, which can collaborate with a software developer on solving a programming problem (either from scratch or by completing a skeleton program). The AI should be able to: - detect if the developer is stuck and requires help - make contextual suggestions and provide hints - question the developer about the rationale for their programming and problem solving decisions - thereby helping them self-evaluate their work - generate contributions appropriate for the developer's emotional state A distinctive aspect of the project will be the use of multimodal communication. Depending on the strengths of the PhD applicant one or more of the following modalities will be used by the AI to interact with the student: - Spoken voice: analysis (content of what the student says, but also emotion) & synthesis (of the AIs dialogue contributions) - Webcam video to monitor: emotion, focus, level of understanding, cognitive load, etc. - Text-based chat (as an alternative to spoken interaction) - Embodied computer-animated representation of the AI buddy (Andrist 2019)

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). EPSRC allocate funding for Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP) using an algorithm based on a variety of criteria including grants awarded to the institution. The Open University Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) currently holds an EPSRC DTP award covering the following subject areas: General Engineering IT, Systems Sciences and Software Engineering Mathematical Sciences Physics

The idea is to design a "dialogue system" interface to existing databases of the arguments surrounding controversial topics such as "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?" or "Should all humans be vegan?". In particular, a user can have a "Moral Maze" style chat with the dialogue system. "Moral Maze" is a longrunning popular BBC 4 Radio programme in which a panel discusses a controversial topic with the help of witnesses and a host who chairs the conversation. The dialogue system consists of a panel of Argumentation Bots (ArguBots) who present arguments for or against the topic under discussion (the pro and con ArguBots), a host ArguBot and a witness ArguBot (that can provide detailed evidence). The user is invited to join the panel and voice their views on the topic under discussion. Thus the user can explore what they thought and what others thought about the controversial topic. An important part of the projects will be to evaluate the effects on people's appreciation of the complexity of debate and attendant ability to comprehend the world from other people's point of view or perspective.

I will attend the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Amsterdam (July 29 - August 1, and present a full paper “Salience and Pointing in Multimodal Reference" at one of the conference workshops on 29 July, The conference presents an excellent opportunity to present my work which combines computer science with empirical studies into human behaviour. The formal model that I have developed based on a number of empirical studies generates several new hypotheses that I would like to present to the community of cognitive scientists. I hope that it will lead to new empirical studies - I am particularly keen to collaborate with others on this. The conference will be attended by a number of people I am already collaborating with in the context of the MREDI initiative (Multimodal Referring Expressions in Dialogue; involving researchers from Aberdeen, Dublin, OU and Neuchatel). It will provide an excellent opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting (in addition to our regular skype conference call meetings) to discuss our current work on annotating a multimodal dialogue corpus and will also allow us to plan future activities. The research carried out in this grouping has already led to two workshop papers and we are planning a submission to a top journal in cognitive science for the final results of our corpus study.