  Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g.,
virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many
daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a
user's social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no
systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation
aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation
aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are
presented through a conceptual architecture centered on two key ideas: (1)
conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of `general'
situation awareness, and (2) using situation taxonomies for such instantiation.
This enables support agents to represent a user's social situation, comprehend
its meaning, and assess its impact on the user's behavior. We discuss empirical
results supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach and illustrate
how the architecture can be used in support agents through two use cases.
