Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners

This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness

The SEMAINE API : a component integration framework for a naturally interacting and emotionally competent embodied conversational agent

The present thesis addresses the topic area of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) with capabilities for natural interaction with a human user and emotional competence with respect to the perception and generation of emotional expressivity. The focus is on the technological underpinnings that facilitate the implementation of a real-time system with these capabilities, built from re-usable components. The thesis comprises three main contributions. First, it describes a new component integration framework, the SEMAINE API, which makes it easy to build emotion-oriented systems from components which interact with one another using standard and pre-standard XML representations. Second, it presents a prepare-and-trigger system architecture which substantially speeds up the time to animation for system utterances that can be pre-planned. Third, it reports on the W3C Emotion Markup Language, an upcoming web standard for representing emotions in technological systems. We assess critical aspects of system performance, showing that the framework provides a good basis for implementing real-time interactive ECA systems, and illustrate by means of three examples that the SEMAINE API makes it is easy to build new emotion-oriented systems from new and existing components.Die vorliegende Dissertation behandelt das Thema der virtuellen Agenten mit Fähigkeiten zur natürlichen Benutzer-Interaktion sowie emotionaler Kompetenz bzgl. der Wahrnehmung und Generierung emotionalen Ausdrucks. Der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit liegt auf den technologischen Grundlagen für die Implementierung eines echtzeitfähigen Systems mit diesen Fähigkeiten, das aus wiederverwendbaren Komponenten erstellt werden kann. Die Arbeit umfasst drei Kernaspekte. Zum Einen beschreibt sie ein neues Framework zur Komponenten-Integration, die SEMAINE API: Diese erleichtert die Erstellung von Emotions-orientierten Systemen aus Komponenten, die untereinander mittels Standard- oder Prä-Standard-Repräsentationen kommunizieren. Zweitens wird eine Systemarchitektur vorgestellt, welche Vorbereitung und Auslösung von Systemverhalten entkoppelt und so zu einer substanziellen Beschleunigung der Generierungszeit führt, wenn Systemäußerungen im Voraus geplant werden können. Drittens beschreibt die Arbeit die W3C Emotion Markup Language, einen werdenden Web-Standard zur Repräsentation von Emotionen in technologischen Systemen. Es werden kritische Aspekte der Systemperformanz untersucht, wodurch gezeigt wird, dass das Framework eine gute Basis für die Implementierung echtzeitfähiger interaktiver Agentensysteme darstellt. Anhand von drei Beispielen wird illustriert, dass mit der SEMAINE API leicht neue Emotions-orientierte Systeme aus neuen und existierenden Komponenten erstellt werden können

Application-driven visual computing towards industry 4.0 2018

245 p.La Tesis recoge contribuciones en tres campos: 1. Agentes Virtuales Interactivos: autónomos, modulares, escalables, ubicuos y atractivos para el usuario. Estos IVA pueden interactuar con los usuarios de manera natural.2. Entornos de RV/RA Inmersivos: RV en la planificación de la producción, el diseño de producto, la simulación de procesos, pruebas y verificación. El Operario Virtual muestra cómo la RV y los Co-bots pueden trabajar en un entorno seguro. En el Operario Aumentado la RA muestra información relevante al trabajador de una manera no intrusiva. 3. Gestión Interactiva de Modelos 3D: gestión online y visualización de modelos CAD multimedia, mediante conversión automática de modelos CAD a la Web. La tecnología Web3D permite la visualización e interacción de estos modelos en dispositivos móviles de baja potencia.Además, estas contribuciones han permitido analizar los desafíos presentados por Industry 4.0. La tesis ha contribuido a proporcionar una prueba de concepto para algunos de esos desafíos: en factores humanos, simulación, visualización e integración de modelos

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation

Buschmeier H. Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2018.Dialogue is an interactive endeavour in which participants jointly pursue the goal of reaching understanding. Since participants enter the interaction with their individual conceptualisation of the world and their idiosyncratic way of using language, understanding cannot, in general, be reached by exchanging messages that are encoded when speaking and decoded when listening. Instead, speakers need to design their communicative acts in such a way that listeners are likely able to infer what is meant. Listeners, in turn, need to provide evidence of their understanding in such a way that speakers can infer whether their communicative acts were successful. This is often an interactive and iterative process in which speakers and listeners work towards understanding by jointly coordinating their communicative acts through feedback and adaptation. Taking part in this interactive process requires dialogue participants to have ‘interactional intelligence’. This conceptualisation of dialogue is rather uncommon in formal or technical approaches to dialogue modelling. This thesis argues that it may, nevertheless, be a promising research direction for these fields, because it de-emphasises raw language processing performance and focusses on fundamental interaction skills. Interactionally intelligent artificial conversational agents may thus be able to reach understanding with their interlocutors by drawing upon such competences. This will likely make them more robust, more understandable, more helpful, more effective, and more human-like. This thesis develops conceptual and computational models of interactional intelligence for artificial conversational agents that are limited to (1) the speaking role, and (2) evidence of understanding in form of communicative listener feedback (short but expressive verbal/vocal signals, such as ‘okay’, ‘mhm’ and ‘huh’, head gestures, and gaze). This thesis argues that such ‘attentive speaker agents’ need to be able (1) to probabilistically reason about, infer, and represent their interlocutors’ listening related mental states (e.g., their degree of understanding), based on their interlocutors’ feedback behaviour; (2) to interactively adapt their language and behaviour such that their interlocutors’ needs, derived from the attributed mental states, are taken into account; and (3) to decide when they need feedback from their interlocutors and how they can elicit it using behavioural cues.This thesis describes computational models for these three processes, their integration in an incremental behaviour generation architecture for embodied conversational agents, and a semi-autonomous interaction study in which the resulting attentive speaker agent is evaluated. The evaluation finds that the computational models of attentive speaking developed in this thesis enable conversational agents to interactively reach understanding with their human interlocutors (through feedback and adaptation) and that these interlocutors are willing to provide natural communicative listener feedback to such an attentive speaker agent. The thesis shows that computationally modelling interactional intelligence is generally feasible, and thereby raises many new research questions and engineering problems in the interdisciplinary fields of dialogue and artificial conversational agents

Application-driven visual computing towards industry 4.0 2018

245 p.La Tesis recoge contribuciones en tres campos: 1. Agentes Virtuales Interactivos: autónomos, modulares, escalables, ubicuos y atractivos para el usuario. Estos IVA pueden interactuar con los usuarios de manera natural.2. Entornos de RV/RA Inmersivos: RV en la planificación de la producción, el diseño de producto, la simulación de procesos, pruebas y verificación. El Operario Virtual muestra cómo la RV y los Co-bots pueden trabajar en un entorno seguro. En el Operario Aumentado la RA muestra información relevante al trabajador de una manera no intrusiva. 3. Gestión Interactiva de Modelos 3D: gestión online y visualización de modelos CAD multimedia, mediante conversión automática de modelos CAD a la Web. La tecnología Web3D permite la visualización e interacción de estos modelos en dispositivos móviles de baja potencia.Además, estas contribuciones han permitido analizar los desafíos presentados por Industry 4.0. La tesis ha contribuido a proporcionar una prueba de concepto para algunos de esos desafíos: en factores humanos, simulación, visualización e integración de modelos