A Conversational Academic Assistant for the Interaction in Virtual Worlds

Proceedings of: Forth International Workshop on User-Centric Technologies and applications (CONTEXTS 2010). Valencia, 07-10 September , 2010.The current interest and extension of social networking are rapidly introducing a large number of applications that originate new communication and interaction forms among their users. Social networks and virtual worlds, thus represent a perfect environment for interacting with applications that use multimodal information and are able to adapt to the specific characteristics and preferences of each user. As an example of this application, in this paper we present an example of the integration of conversational agents in social networks, describing the development of a conversational avatar that provides academic information in the virtual world of Second Life. For its implementation techniques from Speech Technologies and Natural Language Processing have been used to allow a more natural interaction with the system using voice.Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255, and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Adaptive fuzzy knowledge-based systems for control metabots' mobility on virtual environments

The confluence of three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds with social networks imposes on software agents, in addition to conversational functions, the same behaviours as those common to human-driven avatars. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of the use of metabots (metaverse robots) with motion capabilities in complex virtual 3D worlds and we put forward a learning model based on the techniques used in evolutionary computation for optimizing the fuzzy controllers which will subsequently be used by metabots for moving around a virtual environment

On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces

Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information. However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable and affective multimodal interfaces