Papers

Recent research has established the potential for virtual characters to establish rapport with humans through simple contingent nonverbal behaviors. We hypothesized that the contingency, not just the frequency of positive feedback is crucial when it comes to creating rapport. The primary goal in this study was evaluative: can an agent generate behavior that engenders feelings of rapport in human speakers and how does this compare to human generated feedback? A secondary goal was to answer... Read more

Virtual humans offer an exciting and powerful potential for rich interactive experiences. Fully embodied virtual humans are growing in capability, ease, and utility. As a result, they present an opportunity for expanding research into burgeoning virtual patient medical applications. In this paper we consider the ways in which one may go about building and applying virtual human technology to the virtual patient domain. Specifically we aim to show that virtual human technology may be used... Read more

We aim at defining conversational agents that exhibit qualitatively distinctive behaviors. To this aim we provide a small set of parameters to allow one to define behavior profiles and then leave to the system the task of animating the agent. Our approach is to manipulate the behavior tendency of the agent depending on its communicative intention and emotional state. In this paper we will define the concepts of Baseline and Dynamicline. The Baseline of an agent... Read more

Against the background that recent studies on embodied conversational agents demonstrate the importance of their behavior, an experimental study is presented that assessed the effects of different nonverbal behaviors of an embodied conversational agent on the experiences and evaluations of the user as well as on their behavior. 50 participants conducted a conversation with different versions of the virtual agent Max, whose nonverbal communication was manipulated with regard to eyebrow movements and self-touching gestures. In... Read more

Till date no computer program has passed the Turing test although even simple conversational programs, socalled “Chatbots”, could make people believe that they are talking to another human being. The main objective of this paper is to identify some shortcomings of existing conversational agents (e.g. Chatbots) and describe our approach to model human-like conversational agent that overcomes those limitations to some extent. Our primary focus is to sense affective information from input sentence(s) by applying... Read more

The purpose of a chatbot program is generally to simulate conversation and entertain the user. More specialized chatbots have been created to assist with particular tasks, such as shopping. The golden standard that the general chatbot tries to achieve is to pass the Turing test, which means to generate conversation which is indistinguishable from that of a real person. State of the art chatbots have not yet reached this goal, which makes this field so... Read more

During the last decade research groups as well as a number of commercial software developers have started to deploy embodied conversational characters in the user interface especially in those application areas where a close emulation of multimodal human-human communication is needed. Incarnations of such characters differ widely in type and amount of embodiment - starting from simplistic cartoon-style 2D representations of faces, fully embodied virtual humans in 3D virtual worlds to physically embodied androids co-habiting... Read more

In Virtual Reality environments, real humans can meet virtual humans to collaborate on tasks. The agent Max is such a virtual human, providing the human user with a face-toface collaboration partner in the SFB 360 construction tasks. This paper describes how Max can assist by combining manipulative capabilities for assembly actions with conversational capabilities for mixed-initiative dialogue. During the interaction, Max employs speech, gaze, facial expression, and gesture and is able to initiate assembly actions.... Read more

The area of animated interface agents is related to the development of applications that aim to improve humancomputer interaction process using software agents represented by characters or human figures. Although several projects are being developed in this area, there isn’t a method to describe criteria that ought to be considered to evaluate animated interface agents. This paper proposes basic guidelines for animated agents evaluation based on concepts provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We... Read more

An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive... Read more