1998 Papers

Intelligent agents are a new paradigm for developing software applications. More than this, agent-based computing has been hailed as ‘the next significant breakthrough in software development’, and ‘the new revolution in software’. Currently, agents are the focus of intense interest on the part of many sub-fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. Agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems such as email filters to large, open, complex,... Read more

The paper raises questions about images and pattern recognition related with audio/visual interrogation for AI and robotics technology. Read more

Conversation agents present a challenging agenda for research and application. We describe the development, evaluation, and application of Baldi, a computer animated talking head. Baldi’s existence is justified by the important contribution of the face in spoken dialog. His actions are evaluated and modified to mimic natural actions as much as possible. Baldi has the potential to enrich human-machine interactions and serve as a tutor in a wide variety of educational domains. We describe one... Read more

In this paper we describe the computational and architectural requirements for systems which support real-time multimodal interaction with an embodied conversational character. We argue that the three primary design drivers are real-time multithreaded entrainment, processing of both interactional and propositional information, and an approach based on a functional understanding of human face-to-face conversation. We then present an architecture which meets these requirements and an initial conversational character that we have developed who is capable of... Read more

We present new techniques for creating photorealistic textured 3D facial models from photographs of a human subject, and for creating smooth transitions between different facial expressions by morphing between these different models. Starting from several uncalibrated views of a human subject, we employ a user-assisted technique to recover the camera poses corresponding to the views as well as the 3D coordinates of a sparse set of chosen locations on the subject's face. A scattered data... Read more