Papers

When developing cognitive agents capable of interacting with humans, it is often challenging to provide a suitable environment in which agent and user are really co-situated. This paper presents a straightforward approach to use Second Life as a persistent, \near natural\, and socially rich environment for research on autonomous agents in complex surroundings, learning social skills, and how they are perceived by humans. We describe an integration of our conversational agent Max, and his underlying cognitive architecture,... Read more

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

This paper presents an artificially intelligent chat robot called CLIVE. The aim of CLIVE is to provide to a useful and engaging method for people learning a foreign language, to practice their conversational skills. Unlike other systems that focus on providing a limited or structured tutoring experience for language learning, CLIVE has the ability of holding open,natural human-like conversations with people on a wide range of topics. This provides users with a life-like experience that... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are life-like CG characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are sophisticated and are composed with assemblies of various functions. They are thus difficult for an individual research group to develop. To address this problem, we are developing a Generic ECA Framework to integrate those assemblies with each other seamlessly. It is composed with a low-level communication platform, a high-level protocol and... Read more

DEIRA is a virtual agent commenting on virtual horse races in real time. DEIRA analyses the state of the race, acts emotionally and comments about the situation in a believable and engaging way, using synthesized speech and facial expressions. In this paper we discuss the challenges, explain the computational models for the cognitive, emotional and communicative behavior, and account on implementation and feedback from users. Read more

The aim of the paper is to document and share an induction technique (The Sensitive Artificial Listener) that generates data that can be both tractable and reasonably naturalistic. The technique focuses on conversation between a human and an agent that either is orappears to be a machine. It is designed to capture a broad spectrum of emotional states, expressed in ‘emotionally coloured discourse’ of the type likely to be displayed in everyday conversation. The technique... Read more

The literature has demonstrated that sorting through the mass of information available on the Internet is time consuming and sometimes imparts misinformation. In this context, the tendency to customize the content of Web pages by interactive tools will soon become a standard in the development of retailer websites. A new form of customization of the information is emerging in the apparel industry: an avatar (i.e. virtual model) that reflects the consumer’s body. The goal of... Read more

In this article we present a research scheme which aims to analyze the use of Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) technology to improve the robustness and acceptability of speaker enrolment and verification dialogues designed to provide secure access through natural and intuitive speaker recognition. In order to find out the possible effects of the visual information channel provided by the ECA, tests were carried out in which users were divided into two groups, each interacting with... Read more

Researchers demand much from their embodied conversational agents (ECAs), requiring them to be both life-like, as well as responsive to events in an interactive setting. We find that a flexible combination of animation approaches may be needed to satisfy these needs. In this paper we present SmartBody, an open source modular framework for animating ECAs in real time, based on the notion of hierarchically connected animation controllers. Controllers in SmartBody can employ arbitrary animation algorithms... Read more

This paper describes the Evolutionary Virtual Agent (EVA) prototype designed as an interactive entertainment system for a multimedia exhibition. This implementation uses a behavioral engine based on a dynamical subsumption architecture and a 3D animated interface that has been projected onto a physical model. Read more