Papers

Embodied interface agents are designed to ease the use of technology. Furthermore, they present one possible solution for future interaction scenarios beyond the desktop metaphor. Trust and believability play an important role in the relationship between user and the virtual counterpart. In order to reach this goal, a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance and behavior of the artifact is pursued. According to the notion of the Uncanny Valley, however, this actually may have quite... Read more

We present a new technology for enhancing touch interfaces with tactile feedback. The proposed technology is based on the electrovibration principle, does not use any moving parts and provides a wide range of tactile feedback sensations to fingers moving across a touch surface. When combined with an interactive display and touch input, it enables the design of a wide variety of interfaces that allow the user to feel virtual elements through touch. We present the principles... Read more

Elckerlyc is a BML Realizer for generating multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior for Virtual Humans (VHs). The main characteristics of Elckerlyc are that (1) it is designed specifically for continuous interaction with tight temporal coordination between the behavior of a VH and its interaction partner; (2) it provides a mix between the precise temporal and spatial control offered by procedural animation and the physical realism of physical simulation; and (3) it is designed to be... Read more

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation... Read more

Speech is not a common way to interact with an artwork, but recent advances in Artificial Intelligence imply challenges and opportunities to explore new kinds of experiences in the confrontation of the spectator to the artwork. In order to have flexibility in experimentation by performing different art-installations, we have developed and implemented the concept of Talking Agent, a reusable software component with the ability to recognize human speech and synthesize a spoken response, and to... Read more

Although rudimentary memory systems for autonomous agents have existed for quite a while, human-like memory systems which contain extensive episodic, social and affective components, and which can be utilized in order to maintain relationships with humans, have only recently started to appear. Interactive robots are a special case of an autonomous agent, which is physically situated, interacts with humans, and which has sensing and motor abilities. Furthermore, social robots might have... Read more

In this paper we introduce the nano-agent bio-inspired architecture and its programming language called nanoScheme. We describe an application example developed using this software environment: an online self-animated character that interacts using natural language and emotional expressions. This virtual character is based on a “schizophrenic” model in which the character has multiple distinct personalities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the user. Moreover, the qualitative efficiency of this prototype is then... Read more

Sensitive Artificial Listeners (SAL) are virtual dialogue partners based on audiovisual analysis and synthesis. Despite their very limited verbal understanding, they intend to engage the user in a conversation by paying attention to the user’s emotions and nonverbal expressions. The SAL characters have their own emotionally defined personality, and attempt to drag the user towards their dominant emotion through a combination of verbal and non-verbal expression. The demonstrator shows the publicly available, fully autonomous SAL system. Read more

IBM Research undertook a challenge to build a computer system that could compete at the human champion level in real time on the American TV quiz show, Jeopardy. The extent of the challenge includes fielding a real-time automatic contestant on the show, not merely a laboratory exercise. The Jeopardy Challenge helped us address requirements that led to the design of the DeepQA architecture and the implementation of Watson. After three years of intense research and... Read more

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study... Read more