7,020 research outputs found
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
Bringing tabletop technologies to kindergarten children
Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype
Explorations in engagement for humans and robots
This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which
individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived
connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among
human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also
describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational,
collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports
on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot
when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the
human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they
direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement
gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when
engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems
As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing
environments questions of choreography become central to their design,
placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a
system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and
form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The
interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the
system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human
counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human
counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and
the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task
completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and
movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design
methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify
simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have
detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides
approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and
artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The
background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives,
improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this
context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community
building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary
research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering
of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for
rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help
understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other
groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for
the 21st Century)"
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis
Social Situatedness: Vygotsky and Beyond
The concept of ‘social situatedness’, i.e. the idea that the development of individual intelligence requires a social (and cultural) embedding, has recently received much attention in cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. The work of Lev Vygotsky who put forward this view already in the 1920s has influenced the discussion to some degree, but still remains far from well known. This paper therefore aims to give an overview of his cognitive development theory and discuss its relation to more recent work in primatology and socially situated artificial intelligence, in particular humanoid robotics
Exploring the Affective Loop
Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are
involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al.
2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their
emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously
aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make
other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of
signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we
express.
Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little
focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in
the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can
expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated
/eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With
eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical
experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for
input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and
animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the
user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by
affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed
through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human
Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/
(Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in
real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of
involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of
the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended
interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion
one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address
people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically
experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of
eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally
involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and
ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our
subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design
problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop
effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction,
/harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/
/timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and
effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and
experiences of the interaction
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