Papers about Life experience

Although rudimentary memory systems for autonomous agents have existed for quite a while, human-like memory systems which contain extensive episodic, social and affective components, and which can be utilized in order to maintain relationships with humans, have only recently started to appear. Interactive robots are a special case of an autonomous agent, which is physically situated, interacts with humans, and which has sensing and motor abilities. Furthermore, social robots might have... 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

Episodic memory (EM) is an umbrella term for memory systems that operate with representations of personal history of an entity. The content of EM is related to particular places and moments, and connected to subjective feelings and current goals. Recently, it has been argued that EM is one of the key components contributing to believability of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), at least when agents interact with humans for more than a couple of minutes, because it... Read more

We present recent extensions for the intelligent virtual agent development platform Pogamut 3. These extensions are: the agent coordination language StorySpeak designed for the purposes of storytelling applications, support for gestures based on BML, the visual editor of reactive plans, connection of the cognitive architecture ACT-R, an educational application aimed at orientation in urban areas and finally an emotional model. Read more

Gunslinger is an interactive-entertainment application of virtual humans that transforms an iconic Wild West movie scene into a vivid semblance of reality. The project combines virtual humans technology with Hollywood storytelling and set building into an engaging, mixed-reality, story-driven experience, where a single participant can interact verbally and non-verbally with multiple virtual characters that are imbedded in a real, physical saloon. The Gunslinger project pushes the frontier of virtual humans research by combining question-answering dialogue... Read more

The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive research. An android provides an experimental apparatus that has the potential to be controlled more precisely than any human actor. However, preliminary results indicate that only very humanlike devices can elicit the broad range of responses that people typically direct toward each other. Conversely, to build androids capable of emulating human behavior, it is necessary to investigate social activity in detail and to... Read more

The Affective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, offering the user with an affective multimodal interaction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an ‘affective guide with attitude’ that links its memories and visitor’s interest to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen. This paper presents a review of related work, the system in detail, challenges and the... Read more

Imagine a future world where humans and machines will be involved in joint activities requiring social skills. This paper presents an overview of the dawnings of this world, concentrating on chatterbots – computer programs which engage the user in written conversation – and their users. Driving upon Clark’s theory of Language and the psychological theory of self-categorisation by Turner, it presents an analysis of social reactions to chatterbots and a taxonomy of the technology. The... Read more

Of all the legacies of the era of the sixties, three colorful, not to say garrulous, "personalities" that emerged from the early days of artificial intelligence research are worth mentioning: -ELIZA, the Rogerian psychotherapist; -PARRY, the paranoid; and (as part of a younger generation) -RACTER, the "artificially insane" raconteur. All three of these "characters" are natural language processing systems that can "converse" with human beings (or with one another) in English. That is, when presented with sentences in English... Read more

Much of the Artificial Intelligence community is now aware of a computer simulation of paranoid processes developed by the Colby group at Stanford. The model (called PARRY) has been available for interviewing on the ARPA network and thousands of interviews have been conducted with several versions of the model. During the long period of development of the model, we have been aware of the limitations of various alternative programming approaches to designing an algorithm capable... Read more