Papers

The development of virtual agents running within graphic environments which emulate real-life contexts may largely benefit from the use of visual specification by-example. To support this specification, the development system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This language must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requirements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitability to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the... Read more

In my research, I evolve intelligent locomotive strategies in a population of embodied virtual agents. The virtual environment utilizes a physics engine to model real world dynamics. Previous work in this field include the virtual creatures evolved by Karl Sims (1994). This brief paper provides an overview of the results obtained during the research phase of my thesis. Read more

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of Alice, a chatterbot designed in order to elicit anthropomorphic attributions and emotional reactions from those who chat to ‘her’. The analysis is based on both transcripts of the interaction and user comments collected in a focus group. Results suggest that the introduction of explicit anthropomorphism in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a complex phenomenon, which could generate strong negative reactions from the part of the user. The finding also... Read more

This is a research of graphical multi-user communication environments. I have studied the interactive behavior of and between humans and chatterbots. First I will describe the emotional and behavioral impacts that a chatterbot can provoke in users as individuals and as members of a group. Sometimes it is not self-evident to recognize who in a chat room is a bot and who is human. This is due to the limits and possibilities of digital interface,... Read more

Lifelike characters, or animated agents, provide a promising option for interface development because they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles with which humans are already familiar. In this contribution, we revisit some of our past and ongoing projects to motivate an evolution of character-based presentation systems. This evolution starts from systems in which a character presents information content in the style of a TV presenter. It moves on with the introduction of presentation... Read more

The belief that humans will be able to interact with computers in conversational speech has long been a favorite subject in science fiction. This reflects the persistent belief that spoken dialogue would be the most natural and powerful user interface to computers. With recent improvements in computer technology and in speech and language processing, such systems are starting to appear feasible. There are significant technical problems that still need to be solved before speech-driven interfaces become truly conversational.... Read more

This paper describes the evaluation of a natural language dialog-based navigation system (HappyAssistant) that helps users access e-commerce sites to find relevant information about products and services. The prototype system leverages technologies in natural language processing and human-computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with websites, especially for less experienced users. The result of a comparative study shows that users prefer the natural language-enabled navigation two to one over the... Read more

How do we decide how to represent an intelligent system in its interface, and how do we decide how the interface represents information about the world and about its own workings to a user? This article addresses these questions by examining the interaction between representation and intelligence in user interfaces. The rubric “representation” covers at least three topics in this context: how a computational system is represented in its user interface, how the interface conveys its representations... Read more

Websites of businesses should accommodate both customer needs and business requirements. Traditional menu-driven navigation and key word search do not allow users to describe their intentions precisely. We have developed a conversational interface to online shopping that provides convenient, personalized access to information using natural language dialog. User studies show significantly reduced length of interactions in terms of time and number of clicks in finding products. The core dialog engine is easily adaptable to other... Read more

This paper discusses our vision of the future with respect to the introduction of virtual assistants in the e-market. It presents the latest evolution of the involvement framework, an on-going model aimed at driving the design and the evaluation of social agents  virtual characters designed to set up lasting relationships with the users. The framework is based on a review of the literature and on the systematic analysis of the firstgeneration social agents available... Read more