Research News & Events

Virtual human Spike has its own beliefs and values. Additionally, it exhibits rude, pessimistic and confrontational behavior. Even a very cheerful person is not able to convince this virtual agent to chill out, relax or assimilate optimistic outlook. Would you like that Spike became your conversational friend?

The virtual humans industry is growing very fast, as predicted the futurist Erwin van Lun and independent research companies such as Gartner or CCM Benchmark. Nevertheless, many advanced research projects, 3D human design methods or modeling techniques are not commonly known. Therefore, we would like to present three extraordinary state of the art examples of humanlike conversational artificial intelligence. They are expected to be adopted soon by the virtual humans industry.

If you take this course, you will be graded just like Stanford University students, and you can get a certificate matching your skills to the Stanford grading curve. Though online, it is a serious class: 8 homework assignments, 2 timed exams and many hard deadlines. To pass this class, expect to work at least 10 hours per week - Stanford students do all this! Become one of them starting in September 2011.

How to model a human-to-robot romantic relationship? Just a few elements will do: artificial emotional hormones, intelligent affective system and probabilistic parameters of love between humans and the robot…

Having acquired skills of falling in synthetic love, making long-term cyber relationships, and playing pool with two hands, it’s time to take care of the artificial stamina! Recently, robots became active supporters of football and they began to play this most famous game in the world.

Look carefully at the scene presented on the picture below:

If somebody asked you a question: “Where is the coffee cup?”, you could give a simple answer: “on the mat’. But you could also say “to the left of the lamp” as well as “on the table”. All those answers are correct, although they require several subjective and nuanced judgements which we - humans - do intuitively. What about chatbots?

Researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University have developed multitouch gesture-based applications for logging into smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Instead of text typed passwords, they propose biometric authentication: your hand size, finger placement, and speed of movement can serve as a unique signature for login applications.

With the trend of having data stored in the cloud and continuously increasing bandwidths, the idea of a mobile phone being an individual device is no longer necessary. SecurePhone research project, funded partly by the European Commission’s Framework Program 6, aims to change the way people interact and make business. SecurePhone is expected to improve trust and confidence in new technologies by masking high-tech functionalities under the reassuring interface of a smartphone.

You live in a big city. Each day after work you pick up your kid from a large kindergarten. One day you got the flu. You call your father and ask him to pick up his grandchild. He agrees to do it. But… will the kindergarten release the kid? How could they be sure that this is an “authentic” grandfather?