Papers

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

Among the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build Believable Interactive Embodied Agents that are apt to be applied to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired). A believable agent is one able to show (even, may be, to feel?) emotions and one who has a definite personality. An interactive agent... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are synthetic characters which can converse with the user (or with other ECAs) by some natural modalities of human-human communication. ECAs have become increasingly popular, as the promising new interface for several traditional computer applications or as the basis for applications in entirely new domains. Much research has been going on to endow ECAs with own behavioral, personality and emotional models, to enable ECAs to act more or less... Read more

With the emergence of electronic-commerce systems, successful information access on electroniccommerce web sites becomes essential. Menu-driven navigation and keyword search currently provided by most commercial sites have considerable limitations because they tend to overwhelm and frustrate users with lengthy, rigid, and ineffective interactions. To provide an efficient solution for information access, we have built the NATURAL LANGUAGE ASSISTANT (NLA), a web-based natural language dialog system to help users find relevant products on electronic-commerce sites. The system... Read more

Demand for conversational interfaces is great and growing, especially for online commercial applications. Creating such interfaces so that the information is provided is accurate, believable and trusted is a complex engineering task. Various studies into how users react socially to an interface have shown that it is possible to improve the usability and general attraction of an interface by carefully implementing an appropriate personality. These findings are taken and applied to a true, reactive, real... Read more

This paper presents the evolution description and relevance of IVTE- Intelligent Virtual Teaching Environment project in terms of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Education field. Furthermore, it describes the importance of Multi-agents modeling used in the IVTE software and also gives emphasis in the Cognitive Agent Model represented by an Animated Pedagogical Agent. The purpose of IVTE software is to educate children to preserve the environment. The IVTE software is implemented with Multi-agent (MAS) and... Read more

This workshop call demonstrates that our field is eager to move beyond first-generation generalist projects, toward a more mature practice. To do so, we seek to set up a common set of expectations and criteria for how to judge our work. In this paper, we propose some subclasses of embodied conversational character research and design, with criteria for describing and evaluating research and design advances in each. We suggest that researchers in this field could benefit from carefully... Read more

Research on embodied conversational agent interfaces has produced widely divergent results. We suggest that this is due to insufficient consideration of key factors that influence the perception and effectiveness of agent-based interfaces. Thus, we propose a framework for the evaluation of conversational agent interfaces that can systematize the research. The framework emphasizes features of the agent, characteristics of the user, and the task the user is performing. We have conducted experiments within this framework. The first study manipulated the agent's... Read more

Responsive Virtual Human Technology (RVHT) involves the use of natural language processing and an emotive behavioral engine to produce natural, interactive dialogues with intelligent, emotive virtual-reality (VR) agents. RVHT has great potential for use in training interaction skills, such as those required for effective survey interviewing. However, our understanding of how people interact with responsive virtual humans (a.k.a. intelligent agents) is quite limited. Better understanding requires employing RVHT in training applications and conducting systematic use,... Read more

In this paper, we describe an application of responsive virtual humans to train law enforcement personnel in dealing with subjects that present symptoms of serious mental illness. JUST-TALK provides a computerized virtual person to interact with the student in a role-playing environment. Students were able to converse with the virtual person using spoken natural language and see and hear the virtual human s responses a combination of facial gesture, body movements, and spoken language. The... Read more