Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)

Migrating characters: effective user guidance in instrumented environments

The work at hand deals with the conceptual design as well as with the realization of virtual characters, which, unlike previous works in this research area, are not limited to a use in virtual worlds. The presented Migrating Character approach on the contrary allows virtual characters to act and interact with the physical world. Different technical solutions allowing a Migrating Character to move throughout physical space, either completely autonomously or in conjunction with a user, are introduced and discussed as well as resulting implications for the characters behavior. While traditional virtual characters are acting in a well defined virtual world, Migrating Characters need to adapt to changing environmental setups in a very flexible way. A Migrating Character must be capable of determining these environmental changes by means of sensors. Furthermore, based on this data, an adequate adaptation of the characters behavior has to be realized. Apart from a theoretical discussion of the necessary enhancements of a virtual character when taking the step from virtual to real worlds, different exemplary Migrating Character implementations are introduced in the course of the work.Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem konzeptuellen Entwurf und der technischen Realisierung von virtuellen Charakteren, die im Gegensatz zu bisherigen Arbeiten auf diesem Gebiet nicht auf den Einsatz in virtuellen Welten beschränkt sind. Der vorgestellte Migrating Character Ansatz erlaubt virtuellen Charakteren vielmehr in der physikalischen Welt zu agieren und zu interagieren. Verschiedene technische Lösungen, welche es einem Migrating Character ermöglichen sich in der physikalischen Welt autonom bzw. in Abhängigkeit vom Benutzer zu bewegen, sind ebenso Gegenstand der Arbeit wie eine ausführliche Diskussion der daraus für das Verhalten des virtuellen Charakters resultierenden Implikationen. Während sich traditionelle virtuelle Charaktere in einer wohl definierten virtuellen Umgebung bewegen, muss ein Migrating Character flexibel auf sich ändernde Umgebungsbedingungen reagieren. Aus sensorischer Sicht benötigt ein Migrating Character also die Fähigkeit eine sich ändernde physikalische Situation zu erkennen. Basierend auf diesen Daten muss weiterhin eine adäquate Anpassung des Verhaltens des Migrating Characters geschehen. Neben einer theoretischen Diskussion der notwendigen Erweiterungen eines virtuellen Charakters beim übergang von virtueller zu realer Umgebung werden auch exemplarische Migrating Character Implementierungen vorgestellt

Example Based Caricature Synthesis

The likeness of a caricature to the original face image is an essential and often overlooked part of caricature production. In this paper we present an example based caricature synthesis technique, consisting of shape exaggeration, relationship exaggeration, and optimization for likeness. Rather than relying on a large training set of caricature face pairs, our shape exaggeration step is based on only one or a small number of examples of facial features. The relationship exaggeration step introduces two definitions which facilitate global facial feature synthesis. The first is the T-Shape rule, which describes the relative relationship between the facial elements in an intuitive manner. The second is the so called proportions, which characterizes the facial features in a proportion form. Finally we introduce a similarity metric as the likeness metric based on the Modified Hausdorff Distance (MHD) which allows us to optimize the configuration of facial elements, maximizing likeness while satisfying a number of constraints. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated with experimental results

Agentes Pedagógicos Animados

Os últimos anos viram surgir um novo paradigma na construção das interfaces dos ambientes interativos de aprendizagem: os agentes pedagógicos animados. Estes sãopersonagens capazes de guiar os estudantes, auxiliando-os na realização de tarefas, apresentando dicas e respostas afetivas apropriadas para cada situação de aprendizagem. Pesquisas mostram que os usuários aplicam regras sociais aos computadores, mesmo que suas interfaces não sejam explicitamente antropomórficas. Desta maneira, vários pesquisadores têm buscado personificar a interface de seus sistemas incorporando a elas agentes animados, osquais apresentam comportamentos coerentes e credíveis, semelhantes aos dos seres humanos. Pesquisas na área indicam que a personificação da interface realizada através destes personagens pode ter um efeito positivo nas experiências de aprendizagem dos estudantes

Folk Media: Indigenous Learning Systems and Instructional Methodology

Article

A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Gestures that accompany speech are an essential part of natural and efficient embodied human communication. The automatic generation of such co-speech gestures is a long-standing problem in computer animation and is considered an enabling technology in film, games, virtual social spaces, and for interaction with social robots. The problem is made challenging by the idiosyncratic and non-periodic nature of human co-speech gesture motion, and by the great diversity of communicative functions that gestures encompass. Gesture generation has seen surging interest recently, owing to the emergence of more and larger datasets of human gesture motion, combined with strides in deep-learning-based generative models, that benefit from the growing availability of data. This review article summarizes co-speech gesture generation research, with a particular focus on deep generative models. First, we articulate the theory describing human gesticulation and how it complements speech. Next, we briefly discuss rule-based and classical statistical gesture synthesis, before delving into deep learning approaches. We employ the choice of input modalities as an organizing principle, examining systems that generate gestures from audio, text, and non-linguistic input. We also chronicle the evolution of the related training data sets in terms of size, diversity, motion quality, and collection method. Finally, we identify key research challenges in gesture generation, including data availability and quality; producing human-like motion; grounding the gesture in the co-occurring speech in interaction with other speakers, and in the environment; performing gesture evaluation; and integration of gesture synthesis into applications. We highlight recent approaches to tackling the various key challenges, as well as the limitations of these approaches, and point toward areas of future development.Comment: Accepted for EUROGRAPHICS 202

Cognitive Modeling for Computer Animation: A Comparative Review

Cognitive modeling is a provocative new paradigm that paves the way towards intelligent graphical characters by providing them with logic and reasoning skills. Cognitively empowered self-animating characters will see in the near future a widespread use in the interactive game, multimedia, virtual reality and production animation industries. This review covers three recently-published papers from the field of cognitive modeling for computer animation. The approaches and techniques employed are very different. The cognition model in the first paper is built on top of Soar, which is intended as a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behaviors. The second paper uses an active plan tree and a plan library to achieve the fast and robust reactivity to the environment changes. The third paper, based on an AI formalism known as the situation calculus, develops a cognitive modeling language called CML and uses it to specify a behavior outline or sketch plan to direct the characters in terms of goals. Instead of presenting each paper in isolation then comparatively analyzing them, we take a top-down approach by first classifying the field into three different categories and then attempting to put each paper into a proper category. Hopefully in this way it can provide a more cohesive, systematic view of cognitive modeling approaches employed in computer animation

eXtended Reality for Education and Training

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen