Career Interview Readiness in Virtual Reality (CIRVR)
Personnel: Deeksha Adiani, Nilanjan Sarkar
Goals/Objectives:
- Provide an adaptive, engaging, and individualized interview experience to practice interviewing skills in a low-anxiety or low-stress virtual environment
- Visualization of data to help autistic individuals as well as potential employers
Outline:
Employment outcomes for autistic individuals are often lesser compared to neurotypical peers, resulting in greater need for other forms of financial and social support. A great deal of work has been done in developing interventions for autistic children, however, relatively less attention has been paid to addressing employment challenges faced by autistic adults. One key barrier to securing employment is the job interview. Autistic individuals face challenges with the job interview as they experience anxiety, particularly with open ended questions, and unexpected interruptions. They also show atypical gaze patterns, which may be perceived as, but is not indicative on lack of interest or inattention. In response, we developed a job interview simulator for training of autistic individuals and their employers. CIRVR provides an adaptive, engaging, and individualized interview experience to practice interviewing skills in a low-anxiety or low-stress virtual environment. CIRVR is comprised of a conversation management system that drives the interview content, real-time physiology-based stress detection module, as well as a real-time gaze detection module. CIRVR also has a custom Dashboard that provides visualizations of data to help autistic individuals as well as potential employers make sense of data gathered from interview sessions, as well as to provide feedback on performance.
CIRVR has currently been through 1 feasibility study, 1 pilot study,1 outside lab study at Ernst & Young, and will be deployed at Zavikon in California and Montour School District in Pennsylvania.
Video:
Related Publications
- Career Interview Readiness in Virtual Reality (CIRVR): A Platform for Simulated Interview Training for Autistic Individuals and Their Employers
- Evaluation of Webcam-based Eye Tracking for a Job Interview Training Platform: Preliminary Results
- Multimodal Job Interview Simulator for Training of Autistic Individuals
- Dialogue Act Classification via Transfer Learning for Automated Labeling of Interviewee Responses in Virtual Reality Job Interview Training Platforms for Autistic Individuals
- Design of an Interview Script Authoring Tool for a Job Interview Training Simulator Using Graph Transformations