Papers about Applications

The objective of this paper was to examine the impact of avatars’ utilitarian and hedonic values on the different dimensions of e-service quality. The utilitarian value of the avatar impacts 9 of the 10 dimensions of e-service quality. The hedonic value impacts 5 of the 10 dimensions of e-service quality. Our results can also have immediate and direct implications for companies who want to improve a specific dimension of their website by the use of... Read more

With the advancement of computer technology and the popularity of the Internet, there are gradually more online learning resources that can serve as English-learning tools for Taiwanese students. Among those resources, chatbots can process typed messages and respond by showing texts on the screen. Chatbot technology has been incorporated by some English-speaking countries, whose online ticket reservation system and stores adopt conversational agents to serve as information staff. Customers can pose questions online and chatbots... Read more

In some cases seems simple: to contract a skin rash the patient seeks a dermatologist; when the kids are sick he takes them to the pediatrician; or if you want to make a diet seeks a nutritionist. However, the doctor's choice is not always that easy. Currently in Brazil, 53 recognized medical specialties. Besides not knowing exactly what each one of the complicated names as angiologist, nephrologist or proctologist, often the patient is in doubt... Read more

Game environments tend to be highly responsive and demanding and thus provoke active learner involvement. Surprisingly, gaming and in the same line also serious gaming, still make little use of one of people’s most common type of interactions i.e. natural language. Despite the presumed positive effect in e-learning of interactive online characters, the use of virtual characters or so-called Non Player Characters still seems in its infancy. In this work, therefore, we started to look... Read more

In the last years we have developed a platform for the realization of embodied (conversational) agents, in a distributed logic programming framework. In this paper we will present an overview of our work, by discussing the requirements that acted as our guidelines for design decisions during development, some of the applications that have served as target demonstrators for developing and testing new functionality, and the (distributed logic programming) technology which we used for the realization of the platform... Read more

Electrocorticography (ECoG) has emerged as a new signal platform for brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. Classically, the cortical physiology that has been commonly investigated and utilized for device control in humans has been brain signals from the sensorimotor cortex. Hence, it was unknown whether other neurophysiological substrates, such as the speech network, could be used to further improve on or complement existing motor-based control paradigms. We demonstrate here for the first time that ECoG signals associated... Read more

Location-aware ambient environments are relevant in designing interactive virtual characters. However, they raise several questions about spatial behaviors to be displayed by virtual characters, and about the perception of virtual characters by users. We designed a location-aware virtual agent that adapts its spatial behavior to users' and objects' locations during a search task in a smart room. We conducted an experimental evaluation comparing this adaptive agent with an agent that does not perceive nor use... Read more

The presence of consumers and companies in the virtual worlds has increased in recent years. It is predicted that 80% of active Internet consumers and Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community, including social networks, by the end of 2011 (eMarketer, 2007). The increase in the number of consumers with avatars emphasizes the need for a better understanding of who these consumers behind the avatars really are in order to convert these individuals to online and... Read more

The chapter discusses some design challenges encountered when developing a conversational pedagogical agent. By tracing the historical roots of pedagogical agents in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), we discern central developments of creating an agent that is both knowledgeable and fosters a social relationship with the learner. Some main challenges when attempting to develop a pedagogical agent of this kind regard: i) learners’ expectations on the agent’s knowledge profile and social profile, ii) dealing with learners’... Read more

Episodic memory is an important component of “minds” of many long-living virtual agents, for instance non-player characters from role-playing games. So far, research on episodic memory modeling in the context of these agents has focused mostly on producing the memory content online, that is, when the agent is being simulated. In this paper, we address a complementary issue: automatic generation of the memory content off-line. The intended use is generating memories that anticipate the start... Read more