Room for one more? - Introducing artificial commensal companions

Commensality is defined as "a social group that eats together" and eating in a commensality setting has a number of positive effects on humans. In this paper, we discuss how HCI and technology in general can be exploited to replicate the benefits of commensality for people who choose or are forced to eat alone. We discuss research into and the design of Artificial Commensal Companions that can provide social interactions during food consumption. We present the design of a system, consisting of a toy robot, computer vision tracking, and a simple interaction model, that can show non-verbal social behaviors to influence a user's food choice. Finally, we discuss future studies and applications of this system, and provide suggestions for future research into Artificial Commensal Companions

Agents united:An open platform for multi-agent conversational systems

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications. The new platform provides developers with a set of integrated components in a sense-remember-think-act architecture. Integrated components are a sensor framework, memory component, Topic Selection Engine, interaction manager (Flipper), two dialogue execution engines, and two behaviour realisers (ASAP and GRETA) of which the agents can seamlessly interact with each other. This article discusses the platform and its individual components. It also highlights some of the novelties that arise from the integration of components and elaborates on directions for future work