An Affective Model of Action Selection for Virtual Humans

The goal of our work aims at implementing progressively an action selection affective model for virtual humans that should be in the end autonomous, adaptive and sociable. Affect, traditionallydistinguished from "cold" cognition, regroups emotions and motivations which are highly intertwined.We present a bottom-up approach by implementing first a motivational model of action selection to obtain motivationally autonomous virtual humans. For the adaptability of virtual humans and completeness of our affective model of action selection, we will define the interactions between motivations and emotions in order to integrate an emotional layer. In order to understand how they affect decision making in virtual humans, the motivations should represent more quantitative aspect of the decision making whereas emotions should be more qualitative one

An action selection architecture for autonomous virtual humans in persistent worlds

Nowadays, virtual humans such as non-player characters in computer games need to have a strong autonomy in order to live their own life in persistent virtual worlds. When designing autonomous virtual humans, the action selection problem needs to be considered, as it is responsible for decision making at each moment in time. Indeed action selection architectures for autonomous virtual humans need to be reactive, proactive, motivational, and emotional to obtain a high degree of autonomy and individuality. The thesis can be divided into three parts. In the first part, we define each word of our title to precise their sense and raise the problematic of this work. We describe also inspirations from several domains that we used to design our model because this thesis is highly multi-disciplinary. Indeed, decision-making is essential for every autonomous entity and is studied in ethology, robotics, computer graphics, computer sciences, and cognitive sciences. However, we have chosen specific techniques to implement our model: hierarchical classifier systems and a free flow hierarchy. The second part of this thesis describes in detail our model of action selection for autonomous virtual humans. We use overlapping hierarchical classifier systems, working in parallel, to generate coherent behavioral plans. They are associated with the functionalities of a free flow hierarchy for the spreading of activation to give reactivity and flexibility to the hierarchical system. Moreover several functionalities are added to enhance and facilitate the choice of the most appropriate action at every time according to the internal and external influences. Finally, in the third part of this thesis, a complex simulated environment is created for testing the model and its functionalities with many conflicting motivations. Results demonstrate that the model is sufficiently efficient, robust and flexible for designing motivational autonomous virtual humans in persistent worlds. Moreover, we have just started to investigate on the emotional level which has to be improved in the future to have more subjective and adaptive behaviors and also manage social interactions with other virtual humans or users. Applied to video games, non player characters are more interesting and believable because they live their own life when people don't interact with them

Motivations, Values and Emotions: 3 sides of the same coin

This position paper speaks to the interrelationships between the three concepts of motivations, values, and emotion. Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations. While conceptually distinct, the three are so pragmatically intertwined as to differ primarily from our taking different points of view. To make these points more transparent, we briefly describe the three in the context a cognitive architecture, the LIDA model, for software agents and robots that models human cognition, including a developmental period. We also compare the LIDA model with other models of cognition, some involving learning and emotions. Finally, we conclude that artificial emotions will prove most valuable as implementers of motivations in situations requiring learning and development

Simulation of nonverbal social interaction and small groups dynamics in virtual environments

How can the behaviour of humans who interact with other humans be simulated in virtual environments? This thesis investigates the issue by proposing a number of dedicated models, computer languages, software architectures, and specifications of computational components. It relies on a large knowledge base from the social sciences, which offers concepts, descriptions, and classifications that guided the research process. The simulation of nonverbal social interaction and group dynamics in virtual environments can be divided in two main research problems: (1) an action selection problem, where autonomous agents must be made capable of deciding when, with whom, and how they interact according to individual characteristics of themselves and others; and (2) a behavioural animation problem, where, on the basis of the selected interaction, 3D characters must realistically behave in their virtual environment and communicate nonverbally with others by automatically triggering appropriate actions such as facial expressions, gestures, and postural shifts. In order to introduce the problem of action selection in social environments, a high-level architecture for social agents, based on the sociological concepts of role, norm, and value, is first discussed. A model of action selection for members of small groups, based on proactive and reactive motivational components, is then presented. This model relies on a new tagbased language called Social Identity Markup Language (SIML), allowing the rich specification of agents' social identities and relationships. A complementary model controls the simulation of interpersonal relationship development within small groups. The interactions of these two models create a complex system exhibiting emergent properties for the generation of meaningful sequences of social interactions in the temporal dimension. To address the issues related to the visualization of nonverbal interactions, results are presented of an evaluation experiment aimed at identifying the application requirements through an analysis of how real people interact nonverbally in virtual environments. Based on these results, a number of components for MPEG-4 body animation, AML — a tag-based language for the seamless integration and synchronization of facial animation, body animation, and speech — and a high-level interaction visualization service for the VHD++ platform are described. This service simulates the proxemic and kinesic aspects of nonverbal social interactions, and comprises such functionalities as parametric postures, adapters and observation behaviours, the social avoidance of collisions, intelligent approach behaviours, and the calculation of suitable interaction distances and angles

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Structures, inner values, hierarchies and stages: essentials for developmental robot architectures

In this paper we try to locate the essential components needed for a developmental robot architecture. We take the vocabulary and the main concepts from Piaget’s genetic epistemology and Vygotsky’s activity theory. After proposing an outline for a general developmental architecture, we describe the architectures that we have been developing in the recent years - Petitagé and Vygovorotsky. According to this outline, various contemporary works in autonomous agents can be classified, in an attempt to get a glimpse into the big picture and make the advances and open problems visible