Nisha Dharna's Undergraduate Research Academy Project was recently accepted to the 2003 Conference on Computer-Supported Social Interaction (http://www.users.muohio.edu/birchmzp/csi/)
The Paper is entitled "The Effects of Animated Characters with Human Traits on Interface Usability and User’s Perception of Social Interactions (http://www.cs.siue.edu/hci/Papers/CSI2003.pdf)"
Check out the paper, congratulate her, and ask her about it.
I was one of the unlucky people who got to be one of her guniea pigs... I wanted to throw the monitor against the wall.
But I got 20 points of extra credit out of it, so it's aaaaal good. :)
--Beanie