2004 Papers

This final evaluation report describes evaluation studies that have been carried out on various aspects of embodied agents. Read more

Research about interactive characters suggests substantial opportunities for them to enhance online experiences. Automated characters take advantage of social responses that are natural reactions to interactive media. They can be perceived as realistic and well- liked social partners in conversations that simulate real-world interactions. Characters can express social roles, emotions, and organized personalities that match learning goals, company brands, and transaction needs. Characters can increase the trust that users place in online experiences, in part... Read more

Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for input as well as output and exploit the context in which an input is used to compute its meaning. The growing emphasis on conversational user interfaces is fundamentally inspired by the aim to support natural, flexible, efficient and powerfully expressive means of human-computer communication that are easy to learn and use. Advances in human language technology and intelligent user interfaces... Read more

Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the principal applications of conversational agents in the enterprise and the technical challenges posed by their design and large-scale deployments. These technical challenges fall into two categories:... Read more

In this paper, we propose a facial animation system for capturing both geometrical information and illumination changes of surface details, called expression details, from video clips simultaneously and the captured data can be widely applied to different 2D face images and 3D face models. While tracking the geometric data, we record the expression details by ratio images. For 2D facial animation synthesis, these ratio images are used to generate dynamic textures. Because a ratio image... Read more