2009 Papers

Technology interfaces can improve human-machine interaction when they learn to adapt to users in social settings. From cars with voice control, to instructable robots that help with housework, to embodied characters that take website requests, technology is increasingly invading our daily lives and new paradigms are emerging to interact with it. Machines are no longer viewed as complicated yet dumb tools, but rather as smart companions that support task management and relieve us of tedious operation... Read more

Currently, applications that focus on providing conversations with virtual humans require extensive work to create robust conversational models. We present a new approach called Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling. Using this approach, users create conversational models in a distributed manner. To do this, end-users interact with virtual humans to provide new stimuli (questions and statements), and domain-specific experts (e.g. medical/psychology educators) provide new virtual human responses. Using this process, users become the primary developers... Read more

We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. We describe an empirical study of human-human dialogue, analyzing gaze behavior during the production of fillers and use this data to develop a model of agent-based gaze behavior. We find that speakers are significantly more likely to gaze away from their dialogue partner while uttering fillers, especially if the filler occurs at the beginning of a... Read more

The incorporation of games and virtual worlds into the workplace is happening more and more often. One analyst predicts that 80 percent of information workers will have an avatar at home or work by 2011. Why would a company ask its employees to create avatars for themselves? In this paper, the authors explain why avatars and the virtual environments they inhabit are so important to the future of work and demonstrate how engaging employees through... Read more

Embodied social agents are programmed to display human-like social behaviour to increase intuitiveness of interacting with these agents. It is not yet clear to what extent people respond to agents’ social behaviours. One example is touch. Despite robots’ embodiment and increasing autonomy, the effect of communicative touch has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human-robot interaction. This video-based, 2x2 between subject survey experiment (N=119) found that the combination of touch and proactivity influenced whether people... Read more

This paper presents the work to enhance virtual agents with the abilities of interacting with the environment and planning based on goals and internal states. We describe how we designed intelligent virtual agents that are able to perform tasks on a high-risk plant and that respond to expected as well as unexpected events. We proposed an informed virtual environment where agents are able to interact with other agents or avatars. By enhancing their reasoning abilities... Read more

A great challenge that is to be faced in the design of virtual agents is the issue of credibility, not only in the agent's aspect but also in its behavior. To be believable, the agent has to decide what to do next according to the internal and external variables of the agent. Besides others, we have to deal with the problem of action selection which can be resumed to choose the most appropriate action among... Read more

This paper aims to present e the work developed at Cnotinfor within the LIREC project. We will present Little Mozart mind architecture and facial expressions. Our goal is to create a virtual e-learning agent capable of establishing meaningful interactions with children on how to compose and improve their knowledge of melodic composition and basics of musical language. In order to make our agent believable and engaging we resorted to facial and body 3D modeling techniques... Read more

Emotive virtual humans (VHs) are important for affective interactions with embodied conversation agents. However, emotive VHs require significant resources and time. As an example, the VHs in movies and video games require teams of animators and months of work. VHs can also be imbued with emotion using appraisal theory methods that use psychology based models to generate emotions by using the VH's goals and beliefs to evaluate external events. These external events require manual tagging... Read more

This paper provides a method to make locomotion animation using riding motion, which is synthesized by computer simulation. Our locomotion system uses riding motion to avoid collision between objects instead of traditional obstacle avoidance. The two-dimensional locomotion using obstacle avoidance has a problem in that positions that the agent move is limited if the number of agents is large. In game or film, user or artist should throw up natural movement to locate agents in... Read more