Publications

Papers, preprints, and other publications from HUMI Lab.

• The mobile health intervention for rural patients with atrial fibrillation a randomized controlled trial

  JW Magnani, K Plevniak, D Ferry, D Martin, MM Brooks, E Kimani, et al. International Journal of Cardiology, 133575, 2025.

• A Mobile Relational Agent to Enhance Atrial Fibrillation Self-care: Primary and secondary outcomes of a Randomized Controlled Trial

  JW Magnani, CM Lalama, KZ Abebe, D Ferry, BL Rollman, MQ Lancet, et al. American Heart Journal, 2025.

• Aligning Language Models for Icelandic Legal Text Summarization

  Þ Hrafn Harðarson, H Loftsson, S Ólafsson. The Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2025.

• The Development and Feasibility of a Triage System for Use in Primary Care

  MF Helgason, KS Hlífarson, B Olsen, SO Ellertsson, H Loftsson, et al. 2024 IEEE 12th International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), 2024.

• Evaluating Icelandic Sentiment Analysis Models Trained on Translated Data

  ÓA Jóhannsson, BH Arndal, EÖ Jónsson, S Ólafsson, H Loftsson. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL), 2024.

• Exploring the Potential of Virtual Agents in Atrial Fibrillation Management: Insights from a Randomized Trial

  Fallah, Mina and Bickmore, Timothy and Olafsson, Stefan and Paasche-Orlow, Michael and Mrkva, Andrew Joseph and Magnani, Jared W. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA ’24), 2024.

• Accomodating User Expressivity while Maintaining Safety for a Virtual Alcohol Misuse Counselor

  Olafsson, Stefan and Pedrelli, Paola and Wallace, Byron C. and Bickmore, Timothy. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA ’23), 2023.

• Conversational Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment with Virtual Agents

  Hurstak, Emily E. and Olafsson, Stefan and O’Leary, Teresa K. and Cabral, Howard J. and Paasche-Orlow, Michael and Bickmore, Timothy. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA ’23), 2023.

• Community Dynamics in Technospiritual Interventions: Lessons Learned from a Church-based mHealth Pilot

  O’Leary, Teresa K and Parmar, Dhaval and Olafsson, Stefan and Paasche-Orlow, Michael and Bickmore, Timothy and Parker, Andrea G. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2022.

• Design and rationale of the Mobile health intervention for rural atrial fibrillation

  Magnani, Jared W and Ferry, Danielle and Swabe, Gretchen and Martin, Deborah and Chen, Xirun and Brooks, Maria M and Kimani, Everlyne and Paasche-Orlow, Michael K and Ólafsson, Stefán and Bickmore, Timothy et al. American Heart Journal, Elsevier, 2022.

• Designing empathic virtual agents: manipulating animation, voice, rendering, and empathy to create persuasive agents

  Parmar, Dhaval and Olafsson, Stefan and Utami, Dina and Murali, Prasanth and Bickmore, Timothy. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 36(1):1–24, Springer, 2022.

• Techno-spiritual Engagement: Mechanisms for Improving Uptake of mHealth Apps Designed for Church Members

  Yun, Hye Sun and Zhou, Shuo and Kimani, Everlyne and Olafsson, Stefan and O’Leary, Teresa K and Parmar, Dhaval and Hoffman, Jessica and Intille, Stephen and Paasche-Orlow, Michael and Bickmore, Timothy. 2022.

• Mitigating Patient and Consumer Safety Risks When Using Conversational Assistants for Medical Information: Exploratory Mixed Methods Experiment

  Timothy W Bickmore and Stefán Ólafsson and Teresa K O’Leary. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(11):e30704, 2021.

• A Hybrid Structured-Neural Dialog System for Automated Counseling

  Olafsson, Stefan. PhD thesis, Northeastern University, 2021.

• Black Men’s Experiences With Health care: Individuals’ Accounts of Challenges, Suggestions for Change, and the Potential Utility of Virtual Agent Technology to Assist Black Men With Health Management

  Kramer, Justin and Yinusa-Nyahkoon, Leanne and Olafsson, Stefan and Penti, Brian and Woodhams, Elisabeth and Bickmore, Timothy and Jack, Brian W. Qualitative Health Research, 31(10):1772–1785, SAGE Publications, 2021.

• Diversity Informatics: Reducing Racial and Gender Bias with Virtual Agents

  Bickmore, T. and Parmar, D. and Kimani, E. and Olafsson, S. 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 25–32, 2021.

• ‘More like a person than reading text in a machine’: Characterizing User Choice of Embodied Agents vs. Conventional GUIs on Smartphones

  Olafsson, Stefan and Parmar, Dhaval and Kimani, Everlyne and K. O’Leary, Teresa and Bickmore, Timothy. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021.

• Community-Based Cultural Tailoring of Virtual Agents

  O’Leary, Teresa K and Stowell, Elizabeth and Kimani, Everlyne and Parmar, Dhaval and Olafsson, Stefan and Hoffman, Jessica and Parker, Andrea G and Paasche-Orlow, Michael K and Bickmore, Timothy. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2020.

• Motivating Health Behavior Change with Humorous Virtual Agents

  Olafsson, Stefan and O’Leary, Tersa K and Bickmore, Timothy W. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2020.

• Navigating the Combinatorics of Virtual Agent Design Space to Maximize Persuasion

  Parmar, Dhaval and Ólafsson, Stefán and Utami, Dina and Murali, Prasanth and Bickmore, Timothy. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), 1010–1018, 2020.

• Towards a Computational Framework for Automating Substance Use Counseling with Virtual Agents

  Olafsson, Stefan and Wallace, Byron and Bickmore, Timothy W. AAMAS, 966–974, 2020.

• Coerced change-talk with conversational agents promotes confidence in behavior change

  S Olafsson, T O’Leary, T Bickmore. Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, 2019.

• Can the Use of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant for Medical Information Result in Patient Harm?

  Bickmore, TW and Trinh, H and Olafsson, S et al. JCOM, 26(1), 2019.

• Patient and Consumer Safety Risks When Using Conversational Assistants for Medical Information: An Observational Study of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant

  Timothy W Bickmore and Ha Trinh and Stefan Olafsson and Teresa K O’Leary and Reza Asadi and Nathaniel M Rickles and Ricardo Cruz. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 20(9):e11510, 2018.

• Safety First: Conversational Agents for Health Care

  Timothy Bickmore and Ha Trinh and Reza Asadi and Stefan Olafsson. Human–Computer Interaction Series, Springer, 33–57, 2018.

• Looking the part: The effect of attire and setting on perceptions of a virtual health counselor

  Parmar, Dhaval and Olafsson, Stefan and Utami, Dina and Bickmore, Timothy. Proceedings of the 18th international conference on intelligent virtual agents, 301–306, 2018.

• Virtual Counselor for Patients in Medication-Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use

  Olafsson, Stefan and O’Leary, Teresa and Lee, Christina and Bickmore, Timothy. GREATS18 at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2018.

• That’s a Rap: Increasing Engagement with Rap Music Performance by Virtual Agents

  Olafsson, Stefan and Kimani, Everlyne and Asadi, Reza and Bickmore, Timothy. International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 325–334, Springer, 2017.

• Increasing engagement with virtual agents using automatic camera motion

  Ring, Lazlo and Utami, Dina and Olafsson, Stefan and Bickmore, Timothy. International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 29–39, Springer, 2016.

• Learning Icelandic language and culture in Virtual Reykjavik: starting to talk

  Bédi, Branislav and Arnbjörnsdóttir, Birna and Vilhjálmsson, Hannes Högni and Helgadóttir, Hafdís Erla and Ólafsson, Stefán and Björgvinsson, Elías. CALL communities and culture—short papers from EUROCALL, 37–43, 2016.

• Starting a conversation with strangers in Virtual Reykjavik: Explicit announcement of presence

  Ólafsson, Stefán and Bédi, Branislav and Helgdóttir, Hafdís Erla and Arnbjörnsdóttir, Birna and Vilhjálmsson, Hannes Högni. Proceedings from the 3rd European Symposium on Multimodal Communication, Dublin, 62–68, 2016.

• "That reminds me…": Towards a Computational Model of Topic Development Within and Across Conversations

  S Olafsson, T Bickmore. Just Talking–Casual Talk among Humans and Machines Workshop, LREC 2016

• When Strangers Meet: Collaborative Construction of Procedural Conversation in Embodied Conversational Agents

  S Ólafsson. 2015.

• We Never Stop Behaving: The Challenge of Specifying and Integrating Continuous Behavior

  Vilhjálmsson, Hannes Högni and Björgvinsson, Elías Ingi and Helgadóttir, Hafdís Erla and Ólafsson, Stefán. Workshop on Architectures and Standards for IVAs at the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2014.

• Keeping their Cool: Speech vs. Song in British Popular Music

  S Ólafsson. 2012.

• Með kínverskum einkennum: Íslendingar í Kína á öndverðri 20. öld og viðhorf þeirra til kristniboðs

  S Ólafsson. 2012.