virtual agent Papers

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. At a recent meeting on this subject, the above authors participated in a several day discussion on the question of virtual human... Read more

Training of social interaction skills, particularly for emotionally charged situations is becoming increasingly critical in many professions. In cases such as the medical field, however, conventional real-world or role-playing training is extremely limited or even impossible. An example for this is the treatment of injured children. Therefore, we have developed an e-learning system that uses virtual agent technology to simulate the treatment of and human interaction with a hurt, upset boy and his emotional, easily... Read more

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

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

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