Papers

The presence of consumers and companies in the virtual worlds has increased in recent years. It is predicted that 80% of active Internet consumers and Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community, including social networks, by the end of 2011 (eMarketer, 2007). The increase in the number of consumers with avatars emphasizes the need for a better understanding of who these consumers behind the avatars really are in order to convert these individuals to online and... Read more

The chapter discusses some design challenges encountered when developing a conversational pedagogical agent. By tracing the historical roots of pedagogical agents in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), we discern central developments of creating an agent that is both knowledgeable and fosters a social relationship with the learner. Some main challenges when attempting to develop a pedagogical agent of this kind regard: i) learners’ expectations on the agent’s knowledge profile and social profile, ii) dealing with learners’... Read more

We describe our work-in-progress of developing an educational game in mathematics for 12-14 year olds, by adding social and conversational abilities to an existing “teachable agent” (TA) in the game. The purpose of this extension is to affect cognitive, emotional and social constructs known to promote learning, such as self-efficacy and engagement, as well as enhancing students’ experiences of interacting with the agent over an extended period of time. Drawing from the EnALI framework, which... Read more

Paper "The Persona Zero-Effect: Evaluating virtual character benefits on a learning task with repeated interactions" presents embodied agents, that have the potential to become a highly natural human-computer interaction device - they are already is use as tutors, presenters and assistants. However, it remains an open question whether adding an agent to an application has a measurable impact, positive or negative, in terms of motivation and learning performance. Prior studies are very diverse with respect... Read more

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly, and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. We present EMBR, a new real-time character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of control, the animation... Read more

Episodic memory is an important component of “minds” of many long-living virtual agents, for instance non-player characters from role-playing games. So far, research on episodic memory modeling in the context of these agents has focused mostly on producing the memory content online, that is, when the agent is being simulated. In this paper, we address a complementary issue: automatic generation of the memory content off-line. The intended use is generating memories that anticipate the start... Read more

An optimization-based formulation and solution method are presented to predict asymmetric human gait for a large-scale skeletal model. Predictive dynamics approach is used in which both the joint angles and joint torques are treated as unknowns in the equations of motion. For the optimization formulation, the joint angle profiles are treated as the primary unknowns, and velocities and accelerations are calculated using them. In numerical implementation, the joint angle profiles are discretized using the B-spline... Read more

We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) are computer-animated characters that simulate face-to-face conversation with patients. These agents can be programmed with best practices in human-human health communication and used for automated health education and behavior change counseling interventions. Evidence is presentedfrom two ongoing clinical trials demonstrating that patients at different levels of health literacy find these agents acceptable and easy to use for automated health communication interventions. Innovative computer interface systems can be used to ensure that... Read more

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life provide unique opportunities to simulate real life scenarios and immerse the user in an environment that can be tailored to meet specific educational requirements. In these Immersive Learning Environments, students and faculty can interact from anywhere in the real world. From a general education perspective, they allow for virtual classrooms, virtual libraries, interactive role-playing, remote seminars, etc. From a medical education and science perspective, Immersive Learning Environments such as... Read more