Papers about Cultural awareness

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

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

Rapport, the feeling of being "in sync" with your conversational partners, is argued to underlie many desirable social effects. By generating proper verbal and nonverbal behaviors, virtual humans have been seen to create rapport during interactions with human users. In this paper, we introduce our approach to creating rapport following Tickle-Degnen and Rosenberg’s threefactor (positivity, mutual attention and coordination) theory of rapport. By comparing with a previously published virtual agent, the ... Read more

The aim of this study was to investigate if and how an artificially intelligent chat agent (chatbot) that answers questions about sex, drugs, and alcohol is used and evaluated by adolescents, especially in comparison with information lines and search engines. A sample of 929 adolescents (64% girls, mean age = 15), varying in urbanization level and educational level, participated in this study. Use of the chatbot was objectively tracked through server registrations (e.g., frequency and... Read more

Embodied interface agents are designed to ease the use of technology. Furthermore, they present one possible solution for future interaction scenarios beyond the desktop metaphor. Trust and believability play an important role in the relationship between user and the virtual counterpart. In order to reach this goal, a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance and behavior of the artifact is pursued. According to the notion of the Uncanny Valley, however, this actually may have quite... Read more

Although rudimentary memory systems for autonomous agents have existed for quite a while, human-like memory systems which contain extensive episodic, social and affective components, and which can be utilized in order to maintain relationships with humans, have only recently started to appear. Interactive robots are a special case of an autonomous agent, which is physically situated, interacts with humans, and which has sensing and motor abilities. Furthermore, social robots might have... Read more

Episodic memory is an important component of “minds” of many long-living virtual agents, for instance non-player characters from role-playing games. So far, research on episodic memory modeling in the context of these agents has focused mostly on producing the memory content online, that is, when the agent is being simulated. In this paper, we address a complementary issue: automatic generation of the memory content off-line. The intended use is generating memories that anticipate the start... Read more

Over the past decade, motion capture data has become a popular research tool, and motion databases have grown exponentially. Indexing, querying, and retrieving data has thus become more difficult, and has necessitated innovative approaches to using these databases. Our aim is to make this approach feasible for virtual agents signing in French Sign Language (LSF), taking into account the semantic information implicitly contained in language data. We thus structure a database in two autonomous units,... Read more

This paper describes a model for generating steering behaviors of groups of characters based on the biologically-motivated space colonization algorithm. This algorithm has been used in the past for generating leaf venation patterns and tree structures, simulating the competition for space between growing veins or branches. Adapted to character animation, this model is responsible for the motion control of characters providing robust and realistic group behaviors by adjusting just a few parameters. The main contributions... Read more

The challenge of making a virtual world believable includes a requirement for AI entities which autonomously react to a dynamic environment. After the breakthroughs in believability introduced by modern lightning and physics techniques, the focus is shifting to better AI behavior sophistication. Avatars and agents in a realistic virtual environment must exhibit a certain degree of presence and awareness of the surroundings, reacting consistently to unexpected contingencies and social situations. Unconscious reactions serve as evidence... Read more