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66 Socially Intelligent AgentsIn our first prototype of XDM-Agent, the agent’s cooperation personality(and therefore its helping behaviour) may be settled by the user at the beginningof the interaction or may be selected according to some hypothesis aboutthe user. As we said before, the agent should be endowed with a plan recognitionability that enables it to update dynamically its image of the user. Noticethat, while recognising communication traits requires observing the external(verbal and nonverbal) behaviour of the user, inferring the cooperation attituderequires reasoning on the history of interaction (a cognitive diagnosis taskthat we studied, in probabilistic terms, in [7]). Once some hypothesis about theuser’s delegation personality exists, how should the agent’s helping personalitybe settled? One of the controversial results of research about communicationpersonalities in HCI is whether the similarity or the complementarity principleshold—that is, whether an “extroverted” interface agent should be proposed toan “extroverted” user, or the contrary. When cooperation personalities are considered,the question becomes the following: How much should an interfaceagent help a user? How much importance should be given to the user experience(and therefore her abilities in performing a given task), and how much toher propensity to delegate that task? In our opinion, the answer to this questionis not unique. If XDM-Agent’s goals are those mentioned before, that is “tomake sure that the user performs the main tasks without too much effort” and “to makesure that the user does not see the agent as too much intrusive or annoying”, then thefollowing combination rules may be adopted:CR1 (DelegatingIfNeeded U) ⇒ (Benevolent XDM): The agent helps delegatingif-neededusers only if it presumes that they cannot do the action bythemselves.CR2 (Lazy U) ⇒ (Supplier XDM): The agent does its best to help lazy users, unlessthis conflicts with its own goals....and so on. However, if the agent has also the goal to make sure that usersexercise their abilities (such as in Tutoring Systems), then the matching criteriawill be different; for instance:CR3 (Lazy U) ⇒(Benevolent XDM): The agent helps a lazy user only after checkingthat she is not able to do the job by herself. In this case, the agent’scooperation behaviour will be combined with a communication behaviour(for instance, Agreeableness) that warmly encourages the user in tryingto solve the problem by herself.XDM-Agent has been implemented by trying to achieve a distinction betweenits external appearance (its “Body”, developed with MS-Agent) and itsinternal behaviour (its “Mind”, developed in Java). It appears as a characterthat can take several bodies, can move on the display to indicate objects and