The Problem of Communication, Interaction and collaboration.md

The Problem of Communication, Interaction and collaboration

Communication

Communication Types

1. Intrapersonal Communication
   • When people having conversation with themselves (I.e. inner-voice)
2. Interpersonal Communication
   • Conversation with other individual (I.e. one-on-one private conversation)
   • The two individuals involved will swap their roles of sender and receiver in order to communicate in a clearer manner.
3. Small Group Communication [Main Issue]
   • Conversation between multiple individuals, usually 3 and above participants; where the main speaker of the conversation can change in the process.
   • Press conferences, board meetings, and team meetings are examples of group communication. Unless a specific issue is being discussed, small group discussions can become chaotic and difficult to interpret by everybody. This lag in understanding information completely can result in miscommunication.
4. Public Communication
   • One individual giving the talk with multiple listener.
   • There could be short or small interaction between the speaker and the listeners (I.e. when speaker asking a rhetorical question for audience engagement)

Face-to-Face Communication Types

1. Oral
   • Sense of sound
   • Hearing and Speaking
   • When the communication involves individual saying the language
2. Non-Oral [Main Issue]
   • Sense of sight
   • Body Language (Gestures, Pointing, Gazing) and Facial Expression (Emotion)
   • Involves movement of body, change of facial muscles

Potential Solutions

1. Select target agent(s) before initiating conversation
   • Flexibility Concern
     • Need to have a mechanism to cope with the event such as, an agent passing by and overheard the conversation and decide to participate etc.
2. Middle man in the agency space to help determine the talking order
   • Imagine following scenario: 3 agents - Alex, Bob, Charlie are engaged in a conversation
   • Alex is first speaker, when Alex finish speaking either Bob or Charlie would like to speak
   • At this moment, in the agency space, both Bob’s brain and Charlie’s brain are computing responses.
   • When they finish computing response they would send a message to the middle man to request the permission to speak next.
   • Middle man would maintain a queue (FIFO) on each topic (I.e. the topic Alex was talking about earlier) to determine who gets to speak next.
3. Implement social cue / body language functions to help facilitate the conversation/interaction
   • Functions such as say(self, someone) pointAt(self, someone), lookAt(self, someone), askQeustion(self, someone) ‘finishTalking(self)’ ‘moodHappy(self)’ ‘moodSad(self)’ etc
   • For example, Alex engaged in a conversation with Bob and Charlie. At the end of Alex’s dialogue [Alex.say(something)], Alex looked at Charlie [Alex.lookAt(Charlie)] and ask “what do you think?” [Alex.askQuestion(Charlie)].
   • At this point Charlie’s brain would read the social cue and know that he should be responding to Alex. Bob’s brain also observed this social cue and decide to wait to see how would Charlie response to Alex.
   • Player social cue concern
     • How would agent read the social cues from player