Papers about Agent's Capabilities

In realistic looking game environments it is important that virtual characters behave naturally. Our goal is to produce naturally looking gaze behavior for animated agents and avatars that are simply idling. We studied people standing and waiting, as well as people walking down a shopping street. From our observations we built a demo with the CADIA Populus multi-agent social simulation platform. Read more

In this paper, we present a study to evaluate the impact of adaptive feedback on the effectiveness of a pedagogical agent for an educational computer game. We compare a version of the game with no agent, and two versions with agents that differ only in the accuracy of the student model used to guide the agent's interventions. We found no difference in student learning across the three conditions, and we report an analysis to understand... Read more

Virtual training systems provide an effective means to train people for complex, dynamic tasks such as crisis management or firefighting. Intelligent agents are often used to play the characters with whom a trainee interacts. To increase the trainee's understanding of played scenarios, several accounts of agents that can explain the reasons for their actions have been proposed. This paper describes an empirical study of what instructors consider useful agent explanations for trainees. It was found... Read more

Video game technology now enables a new set of experiences for players in addition to conventional video games. Although the intensity of the technological research in this field is shifting from graphics to AI design and characters with embodied agents [1], there have been few studies involving the assessment of real-time sequential, emotional changes of video-game players. Research of this issue and the implications may assist in preventing game addiction and decreasing one's zest for... Read more

Interactive Virtual Standardized Patients (VP) can provide meaningful training for clinicians. These VP's portray interactive embodied conversational characters with realistic representations of a mental or physical problem to be diagnosed or discussed. This research is a continuation of evaluating of our VP "Justina" [2] which suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from a sexual attack and presents the results of comparing novices, test subjects without medical training, and experts interacting with 'Justina' to find out... Read more

Recent studies have shown that virtual humans can facilitate social interactions among people who have difficulty in forming social bonds or help develop their social skills by interaction with virtual practice. Virtual human research tends to focus exclusively on appearance or behavior in assessing agent effectiveness, whereas other studies of human social interaction emphasize aspects of the social context, such as anticipated future interaction (AFI) which has been implicated as a key moderator of people's... Read more

Social relationships are fundamentally important to humans. Children are born into a family social structure and gradually they become part of a wider social structure including peers, in which each individual's relationships are affected by other relationships. To most people expressing appropriate non-verbal social behaviours when interacting with others in a virtual environment (VE) is natural and effortless as they do so daily in the physical world. There is a minority group, such as people... Read more

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

This paper presents an artificially intelligent chat robot called CLIVE. The aim of CLIVE is to provide to a useful and engaging method for people learning a foreign language, to practice their conversational skills. Unlike other systems that focus on providing a limited or structured tutoring experience for language learning, CLIVE has the ability of holding open,natural human-like conversations with people on a wide range of topics. This provides users with a life-like experience that... Read more

The number of virtual assistants has grown rapidly in the last decade. Advances in computer technology, artificial intelligence and natural language processing have led to breakthroughs in rapidly emerging technologies such as personal agents and virtual assistants. Among many interesting applications of virtual assistants the field of statistics seems to be very promising. Advanced features of virtual assistants shall overcome several user-interface problems in the field of statistics. This paper present advantages and drawbacks of... Read more