Apologies for the shameless self-promotion but I’ve just had a book published on Virtual Humans which might be of interest to some of you - and certainly mentions this site, Chatscript, AIML and all the other things we’ve loved over the past decade or so! The book provides details of research on all the main component parts of a virtual human (i.e. a digital avatar, not a robot), and looks at some of the use cases, ethical and social implications and future potential of virtual humans.
You can read a lot more about the book at www.virtualhumans.ai - which also has most of the key models we use and links to relevant papers and web sites, and where we’ll also post new content. A preview of the book (and searchable version) is up on Google Books.