Papers

The fast rendering of large-scale animated human crowds is a very important and interesting problem in research fields of virtual reality, it can be used to do analysis of animated human crowds’regular in museums, theatres, battlefields and so on, owning a bright future. It possesses two main features, one is that the rendering triangular patches are too much, the other is that the human skeletal structures are highly complicated. That makes the rendering of large-scale... Read more

In the last years we have developed a platform for the realization of embodied (conversational) agents, in a distributed logic programming framework. In this paper we will present an overview of our work, by discussing the requirements that acted as our guidelines for design decisions during development, some of the applications that have served as target demonstrators for developing and testing new functionality, and the (distributed logic programming) technology which we used for the realization of the platform... Read more

Since their development in the 1980’s, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have experienced a widespread success in such varying areas of education as military training, personal tutoring, and vocational instruction. ITSs are not without limitations, however, and have often proven to be costly and inflexible. Combining these systems with Intelligent Agents (IA), first proposed in the 1990s, is intended to address some of the shortcomings of ITSs; notably the cost of building new learning objects. While... Read more

In this article we present the subject of virtual assistants, which constitute computer applications based on artificial intelligence technologies (such as Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Speech Synthesis etc.) that are implemented on companies' commercial websites. We present virtual assistants features, and we discuss their important aspects. We point out contribution of virtual assistants in establishing and maintaining customer relations, and we analyze a possibility of modeling business processes using virtual assistants. Finally, we draw... Read more

Empathy is seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This notion is often considered as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating social agents, that are believable and able to engage users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. Indeed, for the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user's... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on models that are rather marginal in current psychological research, or models that are created ad hoc with little theoretical and... Read more

We present the broad outlines of a roadmap toward humanlevel artificial general intelligence (henceforth, AGI). We begin by discussing AGI in general, adopting a pragmatic goal for its attainment and a necessary foundation of characteristics and requirements. An initial capability landscape will be presented, drawing on major themes from developmental psychology and illuminated by mathematical, physiological and information processing perspectives. The challenge of identifying appropriate tasks and environments for measuring AGI will be addressed, and... Read more

The paper contributes to the development of the theory of AI-Completeness. The intended goalis to provide a classification of problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence with respect to theirsolvability. We prove Turing Test to be an instance of an AI-Complete problem and further show certainAI applications to be AI-Complete or AI-Hard by utilizing polynomial time reductions. Finally, the papersuggests some directions for future work on the theory of AI-Completeness. Read more

The security of virtual worlds has become a major challenge. The huge progress of Internet technologies, the massive revolution of media and the use of electronic finance increasingly deployed in a world where the law of competition forces financial institutions to devote huge amounts of capital to invest in persistent digital worlds like Second Life or Entropia Universe whose economic impact is quite real [1]. Thus, virtual communities are rapidly becoming the next frontier for... Read more

This work presents an approach for applying face recognition to non-biological entities (avatars) in virtual worlds to achieve authentication. Massively multiplayer online games involve virtual worlds which require avatar identification to avoid fraud. First, virtual worlds and avatars are briefly discussed. Next, the concepts of facial biometrics and the face recognition systems are presented. Later, support vector machines and wavelet transforms are introduced as classification tools. Finally, the dataset and the designed biometric system are... Read more