Towards a Model of Empathic Pedagogical Agent for Educating Children and Teenagers on Good Practices in the Use of Social Networks Joaqu´ ın Taverner a , Emilio Vivancos b and Vicente Botti c Valencian Research Institute for Artiﬁcial Intelligence (VRAIN). Universitat Polit` ecnica de Val` encia, Valencia, Spain Keywords: Intelligent Agent, Affective Agent, Privacy Risk, Social Network. Abstract: Social networks have been a revolution for our society. The rapid expansion of these networks results in more and more children and teenagers using them regularly. However, despite the fact that most social networks have privacy control systems, most young people do not use these controls because teenagers are usually unaware of the privacy risks that exist in the Internet. This inadequate use of social media can lead to different social problems such as cyber-bullying, grooming, or sexting. The best way to prevent these risks is through education. In this paper we propose an empathic pedagogical agent model for education on good practices in the use of social networks. The agent interacts empathetically with users through the social network. The user’s emotion is recognized through a camera and is processed in real time to obtain the emotion. The agent analyzes the recognized emotion and the users’ actions and looks for the best strategy to advice and educate the teenager in the correct use of the social network. 1 INTRODUCTION Today’s society is increasingly moving towards vir- tual environments. Video calls, instant messaging, and social networks have transformed the way we communicate and relate to others. The incorpora- tion of these new technologies into our daily lives, has been accelerated this year by the pandemic pro- duced by COVID-19. People ﬁnd several advan- tages such as instant communication, the search for lost old friends, the improvement of the prospects of ﬁnding a job, or the communication in times of conﬁnement. The democratisation of the use of the Internet is resulting in more and more children and teenagers using them. In fact, today the young people are the biggest consumers of technology and social networks (Garc´ ıa-Pe˜ nalvo and Kearney, 2016). How- ever, young people are often not aware of the privacy risk they are exposed to when using the Web (Ale- many et al., 2019). An inappropriate use of social networks can have negative personal, professional, and emotional consequences (Machimbarrena et al., 2018). These consequences are aggravated when they occur in children and teenagers, as they do not have sufﬁcient emotional capacity to deal with certain sit- uations that may arise from the inappropriate use of a https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5163-5335 b https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0213-0234 c https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6507-2756 social networks. Therefore, for a social transition to- wards virtualised environments to be effective, it is necessary to design educational models focused on teaching the correct use of the Internet. An appro- priate use of the web can turn it into a pedagogi- cal tool that allows a great dissemination of knowl- edge (Karal et al., 2017). Artiﬁcial intelligence can help in this educational task through the use of intel- ligent agents acting as tutors in the use of social net- works. Intelligent agents have already been used in education with good results (Obaid et al., 2018; Ser- holt and Barendregt, 2016). In particular, agents with empathic abilities, capable of recognising and show- ing emotions, have been successfully used in educa- tional tasks by increasing the sociability and partici- pation of young people (Rodrigues et al., 2015). Fur- thermore, empathic intelligent agents are perceived as much more reliable than traditional agents by children and teenagers. This advantage makes empathic agents more suitable for tutoring (Paiva et al., 2017). In this paper we propose a model of empathic pedagogical agent to be used as a tutor to train young people in the correct use of a social network. The rest of this paper is organized as follow. In section 2, we discuss the problem of privacy risk in the Internet and the most important proposals regard- ing pedagogy with agents and education in the use of social networks. Section 3 introduces a empathetic pedagogical agent model for education on social net- works. The agent will interact with students in an af- Taverner, J., Vivancos, E. and Botti, V. Towards a Model of Empathic Pedagogical Agent for Educating Children and Teenagers on Good Practices in the Use of Social Networks. DOI: 10.5220/0010345504390445 In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Agents and Artiﬁcial Intelligence (ICAART 2021) - Volume 1, pages 439-445 ISBN: 978-989-758-484-8 Copyright c  2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 439