SenToy and FantasyA: evaluating affective gaming

Gaming is a highly relevant application area for Intelligent Agents and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Computer games bring us a full set of new gaming experiences where synthetic characters take on the main role.Using affective input in the interaction with a game and in particular with a character is a recent and fairly unexplored dimension. This video presents a study of a tangible interaction device for affective input and its use in a role-playing game where emotions are part of the game logic

Cognitive agent based on the 16PF, for analysis of human personality

This paper presents the development of an architecture for a Multi-Agent System Based on SocialRational Personality, which seeks the human personality empathy, based on the 16 Personality Factor (16 PF) of Raymond Cattell, and the primary emotions methodology of Paul Ekman. Intelligent Agents will be used for learning and knowledge acquisition, Vision Techniques for pre-processing images, Neural Networks for people and gestures recognition, Fuzzy Logic to ponder emotions and Clustering for grouping similar personalities

Reasoning about Emotional Agents

In this paper we are concerned with reasoning about agents with emotions. To be more precise: we aim at a logical account of emotional agents. The very topic may already raise some eyebrows. Reasoning / rationality and emotions seem opposites, and reasoning about emotions or a logic of emotional agents seems a contradiction in terms. However, emotions and rationality are known to be more interconnected than one may suspect. There is psychological evidence that having emotions may help one to do reasoning and tasks for which rationality seems to be the only factor [1]. Moreover, work by e.g. Sloman [5] shows that one may think of designing agentbased systems where these agents show some kind of emotions, and, even more importantly, display behaviour dependent on their emotional state. It is exactly in this sense that we aim at looking at emotional agents: artificial systems that are designed in such a manner that emotions play a role. Also in psychology emotions are viewed as a structuring mechanism. Emotions are held to help human beings to choose from a myriad of possible actions in response to what happens in ou

Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

A model for providing emotion awareness and feedback using fuzzy logic in online learning

Monitoring users’ emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. In the learning context, emotions can be used to increase students’ attention as well as to improve memory and reasoning. In this context, tutors should be prepared to create affective learning situations and encourage collaborative knowledge construction as well as identify those students’ feelings which hinder learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to label affective behavior in educational discourse based on fuzzy logic, which enables a human or virtual tutor to capture students’ emotions, make students aware of their own emotions, assess these emotions and provide appropriate affective feedback. To that end, we propose a fuzzy classifier that provides a priori qualitative assessment and fuzzy qualifiers bound to the amounts such as few, regular and many assigned by an affective dictionary to every word. The advantage of the statistical approach is to reduce the classical pollution problem of training and analyzing the scenario using the same dataset. Our approach has been tested in a real online learning environment and proved to have a very positive influence on students’ learning performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft