2010 Papers

This paper seeks to investigate current development and applications of these systems worldwide, while focusing on their availability in Canadian libraries. It aims to argue that it is both timely and conceivable for Canadian libraries to consider adopting conversational agents to enhance – not replace – face-to-face human interaction. Potential users include library web site tour guides, automated virtual reference and readers' advisory librarians, and virtual story-tellers. To provide background and justification for this argument,... Read more

Unit selection speech synthesis has reached high levels of naturalness and intelligibility for neutral read aloud speech. However, synthetic speech generated using neutral read aloud data lacks all the attitude, intention and spontaneity associated with everyday conversations. Unit selection is heavily data dependent and thus in order to simulate human conversational speech, or create synthetic voices for believable virtual characters, we need to utilise speech data with examples of how people talk rather than how... Read more

Affect sensitivity is an important requirement for artificial companions to be capable of engaging in social interaction with human users. This paper provides a general overview of some of the issues arising from the design of an affect recognition framework for artificial companions. Limitations and challenges are discussed with respect to other capabilities of companions and a real world scenario where an iCat robot plays chess with children is presented. In this scenario, affective states... Read more

This paper describes an approach used to build a practical AI solution for a 3D boxing simulation game. The features of the designed AI agent are based on our deliberate concentration on believability, i.e. human-likeness of agent's behavior. We show how learning by observation and case-based reasoning techniques can be used to create an AI decision-making system for an industrial-level computer game. The chosen AI design principles support high usability and maintainability, which is important... Read more

Emerging applications of computer vision and pattern recognition in mobile devices and networked computing require the development of resource-limited algorithms. Linear classification techniques have an important role to play in this context, given their simplicity and low computational requirements. The paper reviews the state-of-the-art in gender classification, giving special attention to linear techniques and their relations. It discusses why linear techniques are not achieving competitive results and shows how to obtain state-of-the-art performances. Our work... Read more

In everyday life, one increasingly encounters virtual characters. Virtual (online) worlds, on the one hand, are populated by avatars, that is, mediated human interlocutors represented by a virtual body. Examples are Second Life or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft. On the other hand, websites, pedagogical programs, or technological devices are increasingly being equipped with virtual characters programmed to act autonomously and to conduct basic verbal and nonverbal interaction with the... Read more

We examined how the presence and nonverbal communication of an animated pedagogical agent affects students’ perceptions and learning. College students learned about astronomy either without an agent’s image or with an agent under one of the following conditions: a static agent (S), an agent with deictic movements (D), an agent with facial expressions (E), or an agent with both deictic movements and facial expressions (DE). Group S outperformed group E on a comprehension test, but... Read more

Pedagogical agents – lifelike characters that guide users through multimedia learning environments – are intended to facilitate the learning process. According to social agency theory, the presentation of social cues (the image and voice of the agent) may prime the social interaction schema and cause the learner to deeply process the learning material. Research on pedagogical agents focuses mainly on either the role of the presence of pedagogical agents, by comparing agent and no-agent groups,... Read more

Numerous studies have tested the effects of pedagogical agents on learning and the influence of their specific appearance. What has not been analyzed, however, is whether an agent can have indirect effects when it is employed as a tutor for learning strategies rather than directly teaching the relevant learning material. In a between-subjects design (N = 45) we compared two different kinds of pedagogical agents – a cartoon-like rabbit and a realistic anthropomorphic agent –... Read more

Los Asistentes Virtuales son un conjunto de programas informáticos capaces de interactuar con los seres humanos en su propio lenguaje (Español en nuestro caso). En particular los Asistentes Virtuales de Clases, AVC, están especializados en algún campo del conocimiento y con rutinas específicas para realizar tutorías, administrar exámenes, etc. Los mismos pueden ser accedidos oblicuamente mediante un navegador de Internet, constituyendo un novedoso recurso pedagógico y de singular importancia. El presente trabajo se basa en la prueba piloto, realizada... Read more