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Companion-Technology: An Overview

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Abstract

Companion-technology is an emerging field of cross-disciplinary research. It aims at developing technical systems that appear as “Companions” to their users. They serve as co-operative agents assisting in particular tasks or, in a more general sense, even give companionship to humans. Overall, Companion-technology enables technical systems to smartly adapt their services to individual users’ current needs, their requests, situation, and emotion. We give an introduction to the field, discuss the most relevant application areas that will benefit from its developments, and review the related research projects.

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Acknowledgments

This work is done within the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 62 “Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We want to thank our colleagues Felix Richter, Thomas Geier, Frank Honold, Georg Layher, and Florian Nothdurft for discussions and pointers to literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Ulm University, 89069, Ulm, Germany

    Susanne Biundo, Daniel Höller & Pascal Bercher

  2. Büro für intelligente Technologie-Beratung, 88471, Laupheim, Germany

    Bernd Schattenberg

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  1. Susanne Biundo
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  2. Daniel Höller
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Correspondence to Susanne Biundo or Pascal Bercher.

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Biundo, S., Höller, D., Schattenberg, B. et al. Companion-Technology: An Overview. Künstl Intell 30, 11–20 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-015-0419-3

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