About

Overview

This effort will lay the foundation for a research center on Empathy Training using XR+AI. Empathy has been identified as a key attribute in high intensity community service provision, particularly in the context of deep social and cultural diversity. The project will scope the potentials of XR (Extended Reality) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to support education and training for empathic communication. The combination of technologies we propose to explore are of wide applicability. However, in our initial work we will focus on two critical areas: health care and law enforcement.

The core team for this effort consists of renowned researchers at UIUC in their respective fields, bringing perspectives from education and curricular design, cultural competency, compassionate communication, human factors, empathy, industrial design, XR (Extended Reality, encompassing Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality), artificial intelligence (AI), human performance and skills training, medical training, and police training. The multidisciplinary team and transdisciplinary approach to address the urgent need for empathic communication in healthcare and law enforcement is novel and innovative, as well as timely in the current “empathy economy”. Our AI focus will draw on team members’ expertise in the development of Generative AI applications. The team also has deep domain expertise in the twoproposed application domains where there is a critical need for empathy training: medical education and law enforcement. 

The team will organize three workshops to: 1) explore and exchange current best practices in empathic communication and cultural competency; 2) define key challenges and identify and recalibrate AI tools (generative AI in particular) and XR for empathy training in workforce development, using healthcare and law enforcement as two distinct yet in some respects similar use cases; and 3) construct a roadmap for future research and development in the proposed Center. Based on a survey of the state-of-the-art XR technology and professional learning, we will construct a roadmap/framework for a future Centre for Empathy Training, a resource bank for fine-tuning an LLM, and an ontology of empathy for AI applications.