2011 Papers

This paper reports on an ongoing effort to enable the rapid development of multi-party virtual human negotiation scenarios. We present a case study in which a new scenario supporting negotiation between two human role players and two virtual humans was developed over a period of 12 weeks. We discuss the methodology and development process that were employed, from storyline design through role play and iterative development of the virtual humans’ semantic and task representations and natural language processing capabilities. We analyze the effort, expertise, and time required for... Read more

Linear models, particularly those based on principal component analysis (PCA), have been used successfully on a broad range of human face-related applications. Although PCA models achieve high compression, they have not been widely used for animation in a production environment because their bases lack a semantic interpretation. Their parameters are not a natural set for animators to work with. In this paper we present a linear face modelling approach that allows intuitive click-and-drag interaction for... Read more

Avatars, a word once uttered by only hardcore gamers and science fiction fans, have begun to make their way into living rooms across the world. Their infiltration into our everyday lives has grown from a subtle trend to a suddenly marked phenomenon. Avatars appear as virtual sales associates that assist consumers on websites and as feature realistic digital representations that move in sync with the players’ movements in console video games, such as Microsoft’s Kinect... Read more

Imagine one morning in the near future a fellow named Dave arrives at his office and begins reading his email to prioritize tasks for the work day ahead. One message contains an embedded video. He clicks on the play button and sees an animated human head speaking with a human voice that asks him to click on a link to a survey. Normally, he would move on to other messages and return to do the... Read more

Rapport, the feeling of being "in sync" with your conversational partners, is argued to underlie many desirable social effects. By generating proper verbal and nonverbal behaviors, virtual humans have been seen to create rapport during interactions with human users. In this paper, we introduce our approach to creating rapport following Tickle-Degnen and Rosenberg’s threefactor (positivity, mutual attention and coordination) theory of rapport. By comparing with a previously published virtual agent, the ... Read more

The overarching goal of the FaceBots project is to support the achievement of sustainable long-term human-robot relationships through the creation of robots with face recognition and natural language capabilities, which exploit and publish online information, and especially social information available on Facebook, and which achieve two significant novelties. The underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of episodic memories that... Read more

Today the proliferation of social activity over the web in conjunction with the ever increasing number of connected devices is drastically changing the way we do things in our everyday lives. Instead of picking up the phone to call a friend, turn on our TV set to watch breaking news, tune to our favorite station to listen the latest hit or even open our pc to send an email all the more we opt to... Read more

We present a novel approach for creating intelligent conversational agents based on a “schizophrenic” model implemented using the EVA (Evolutionary Virtual Agent) nano-agent architecture. The Ms House experiment developed using this approach is compared with Eliza and the Alice chatterbot. Read more

This paper is about the history, frustrations, considerations, and decisions that led to the creation of our award-winning ChatBot technology. We also look at issues involved in designing a ChatBot and how various programs have handled them. And we explore some uses for ChatBots. Read more

This paper describes the design, implementation, and use of an agent architecture that has been deployed in Alelo, Inc.’s language and culture training systems, which offer practical training for foreign language skills and intercultural competence. These agents support real-time conversation in the language of interest (Dari, Pashto, Arabic, French, and others), using automatic speech recognition and immersive simulation technologies. In earlier work, we developed a number of agent-based language and culture trainers, based on the... Read more