2009 Papers

Researchers of systems for Digital Entertainment have resorted to Artificial Intelligence to create characters that are more adaptable to new situations, less predictable, with fast learning capabilities, memory of past situations and a variety of convincing and consistent behaviors. Recent studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience analyze the fundamental role of personality and emotions in human cognition, based on the notions of perception, attention, planning, reasoning, learning, memory and decision making. These notions can be characterized... Read more

Thanks to the progress of computer vision technologies and human sensing technologies, human behaviors, such as gaze and head poses, can be accurately measured in real time. Previous studies in multimodal user interfaces and intelligent virtual agents presented many interesting applications by exploiting such sensing technologies [1, 2]. However, little has been studied how to extract communication signals from a huge amount of data, and how to use such data in dialogue management in conversational... Read more

Duarte Digital is an agent that engages in inquiry-oriented conversations about an art artifact. Since it was build for a Museum, interactions are supposed to be directed to different types of audience: an interaction with an art expert should be carried out in a different way than an interaction with a child; likewise, interactions with users interested in learning should be distinct from interactions with users having only entertainment goals. Being so, an agent needs... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are commonly accepted as a new metaphor of Human Computer Interaction in several application domains. They are also used with the roles of influence and behavior change. We present an empirical evaluation study to compare the motivational impact of a persuasive message when conveyed by Valentina (a female young character [1]) and when presented through a text. The believability of our agent has been successfully evaluated in our previous research. Read more

Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate, particularly due to the subjectivity involved. From the various efforts to develop standard evaluation schemes for IVA systems the scheme proposed by Isbister & Doyle, which evaluates systems across five categories, seems particularly appropriate. To examine how these categories are being used, the evaluations presented in the proceedings of IVA '07 and IVA '08 are summarised and the extent to which the five categories in... Read more

The importance of sound and music in movies (Film Scoring) is undeniable. Film Scoring is used as a complement to the visual content helping to better understand it. The use of these artistic elements can be extended to interactive storytelling (IS) environments where stories are also told in a dynamic and interactive way. Because of IS particularities, such as the unpredictability of user actions and story development, this extension is not straightforward, and presents a... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) provide one possible way of incorporating nonverbal portion of speech into voice based user interfaces. Part of agent's visual behavior and its appearance is often solved "statically." There is another possibility to change appearance - dynamically (for example head or eye movements, mouth opening, etc.). Our hypothesis is that some "dynamic" parameters are more important for the user than the other ones. In this paper we present the pilot user study... Read more

We present the Adaptive Mind Agent, an intelligent virtual agent that is able to actively participate in a real-time, dynamic environment. The agent is equipped with a collection of processing tools that form the basis of its perception from and action on the environment consisting of web documents, URLs, RRS feeds, domain-specific knowledgebases, other accessible virtual agents and the user. How these predispositions are finally shaped into unique agent behaviour depends on the agent's abilities... Read more

In multi-user interaction, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) have to detect mental states of each user to interact smoothly and naturally. In addition, mental states of a person may be affected by extrinsic factors, such as states of people around. Physiological indices was useful to understand mental states of a person. However, it was impractical that ECAs measure physiological indices of users. The purpose of this study was whether we could detect intrinsic "involvement, enjoyment, and/or... Read more

How do we construct credible personalities? The current SAL (Sensitive Artificial Listeners) characters were constructed intuitively and can be unconvincing. In addressing these issues, this paper considers a theory of personality and associated emotional traits, and discusses how behaviours associated with personality types in people may be adapted to develop characteristics of virtual agents. Our objective is to ensure that behavioural perceptions of a virtual agent credibly reflect the agent's 'actual' personality as prescribed. Read more