Papers

This paper presents recent work on the addition of emotions and affective behaviour to robotic avatars within Second Life, as part of continuing research and development in the area of interactive agents for games and simulations. The development is based upon the E-AI architecture [1] which is a proposed computational model of emotions intended to be used by developers who already have their own agent AI systems. In this work, the E-AI architecture was applied to... Read more

This report documents the work done for the Technology Strategy Board feasibility study Applying Techniques from Intelligent Robotics to Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Worlds. At a high level this project can be seen as taking theories and technologies developed for building intelligent robots that interact with humans and their surroundings [5, 16] and investigating how they operate in Second Life (SL).The following section describes the background to the project in more detail, then subsequent sections detail the work... Read more

Unlike computer games where Non-Player-Character avatars are common, in most virtual worlds they are the exception. Deploying an embodied AI into a virtual world offers a unique opportunity to evaluate embodied AIs, and to develop them within an environment where human and computer are on almost equal terms. This paper presents an architecture being used for the deployment of chatbot driven avatars within the Second Life virtual world, looks at the challenges of deploying an... Read more

The paper presents a novel sentence-based language classifier that accepts a sentence as input and produces a confidence value for each target language. The proposed classifier incorporates Unicode based features and a neural network. The three features Unicode, exclusive Unicode and word matching score are extracted and fed to a neural network for obtaining a final confidence value. The word matching score is calculated by matching words in an input sentence against a common word... Read more

A chatbot is a program capable of conversing in natural language. First conceived in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum with the creation of ELIZA, chatbots rose to popularity in the 90s – partly because of advances in technology, but also because of the appearance of the Loebner Prize competition. This competition is based on Turing’s imitation game, which is the original ‘Turing Test’. Although it has dominated the chatbot scene in recent years, it has been... Read more

The notion that a computer can decode brain signals to infer the intentions of a human and then enact those intentions directly through a machine is becoming a realistic technical possibility. These types of devices are known as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The evolution of these neuroprosthetic technologies could have significant implications for patients with motor disabilities by enhancing their ability to interact and communicate with their environment. The cortical physiology most investigated and used for... Read more

Embodied pedagogical agents – visually represented, computer generated characters in pedagogical roles, such as virtual instructors, mentors and learning companions – populate the digital society in increasing numbers. They are found in educational programmes from preschool to university, as well as in broader educational contexts in the form of medical counsellors, virtual health coaches, information guides, etc. Since long, they also appear in edutainment and infotainment settings. The paper addresses psychological, cognitive and social aspects of... Read more

Facial animation is referred to all those systems performing the speech synchronization with an animated face model. This kind of systems are called "Talking Head" or "Talking Face". In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. It requires an input query and an answer is generated in form of text. The answer is transduced into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are... Read more

Basilica is an event-driven software architecture for creating conversational agents as a collection of reusable components. Software engineers and computer scientists can use this general architecture to create increasingly sophisticated conversational agents. We have developed agents based on Basilica that have been used in various application scenarios and foresee that agents build on Basilica can cater to a wider variety of interactive situations as we continue to add functionality to our architecture. Read more

Technology interfaces can improve human-machine interaction when they learn to adapt to users in social settings. From cars with voice control, to instructable robots that help with housework, to embodied characters that take website requests, technology is increasingly invading our daily lives and new paradigms are emerging to interact with it. Machines are no longer viewed as complicated yet dumb tools, but rather as smart companions that support task management and relieve us of tedious operation... Read more