Developing enhanced conversational agents for social virtual worlds

In This Paper, We Present A Methodology For The Development Of Embodied Conversational Agents For Social Virtual Worlds. The Agents Provide Multimodal Communication With Their Users In Which Speech Interaction Is Included. Our Proposal Combines Different Techniques Related To Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Affective Computing, And User Modeling. A Statistical Methodology Has Been Developed To Model The System Conversational Behavior, Which Is Learned From An Initial Corpus And Improved With The Knowledge Acquired From The Successive Interactions. In Addition, The Selection Of The Next System Response Is Adapted Considering Information Stored Into User&#39 S Profiles And Also The Emotional Contents Detected In The User&#39 S Utterances. Our Proposal Has Been Evaluated With The Successful Development Of An Embodied Conversational Agent Which Has Been Placed In The Second Life Social Virtual World. The Avatar Includes The Different Models And Interacts With The Users Who Inhabit The Virtual World In Order To Provide Academic Information. The Experimental Results Show That The Agent&#39 S Conversational Behavior Adapts Successfully To The Specific Characteristics Of Users Interacting In Such Environments.Work partially supported by the Spanish CICyT Projects under grant TRA2015-63708-R and TRA2016-78886-C3-1-R

Editorial: Crossing boundaries: Learning and teaching in virtual worlds

The January 2010 special issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology presents papers on virtual-world environments into teaching and learning practices. A theme that is present in all papers in this special issue is that of sociability and the capabilities of VirtualWorlds to support groups or communities of learners. Dalgarno and Lee review the unique characteristics of virtual worlds, identifying opportunities for researchers and practitioners to use virtual worlds in education in relation to the potential learning benefits they provide. Bellotti and colleagues in this issue focus on describing the development of tools and processes that allow for the development of re-usable learning tasks that can be embedded across virtual worlds. Veletsianos and colleagues focus on intelligent and conversational pedagogical agents/avatars. The issue ranges from the directions of research and practice in the use and application of virtual worlds for learning and training

A Conversational Academic Assistant for the Interaction in Virtual Worlds

Proceedings of: Forth International Workshop on User-Centric Technologies and applications (CONTEXTS 2010). Valencia, 07-10 September , 2010.The current interest and extension of social networking are rapidly introducing a large number of applications that originate new communication and interaction forms among their users. Social networks and virtual worlds, thus represent a perfect environment for interacting with applications that use multimodal information and are able to adapt to the specific characteristics and preferences of each user. As an example of this application, in this paper we present an example of the integration of conversational agents in social networks, describing the development of a conversational avatar that provides academic information in the virtual world of Second Life. For its implementation techniques from Speech Technologies and Natural Language Processing have been used to allow a more natural interaction with the system using voice.Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255, and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

No Grice: Computers that Lie, Deceive and Conceal

In the future our daily life interactions with other people, with computers, robots and smart environments will be recorded and interpreted by computers or embedded intelligence in environments, furniture, robots, displays, and wearables. These sensors record our activities, our behavior, and our interactions. Fusion of such information and reasoning about such information makes it possible, using computational models of human behavior and activities, to provide context- and person-aware interpretations of human behavior and activities, including determination of attitudes, moods, and emotions. Sensors include cameras, microphones, eye trackers, position and proximity sensors, tactile or smell sensors, et cetera. Sensors can be embedded in an environment, but they can also move around, for example, if they are part of a mobile social robot or if they are part of devices we carry around or are embedded in our clothes or body. \ud \ud Our daily life behavior and daily life interactions are recorded and interpreted. How can we use such environments and how can such environments use us? Do we always want to cooperate with these environments; do these environments always want to cooperate with us? In this paper we argue that there are many reasons that users or rather human partners of these environments do want to keep information about their intentions and their emotions hidden from these smart environments. On the other hand, their artificial interaction partner may have similar reasons to not give away all information they have or to treat their human partner as an opponent rather than someone that has to be supported by smart technology.\ud \ud This will be elaborated in this paper. We will survey examples of human-computer interactions where there is not necessarily a goal to be explicit about intentions and feelings. In subsequent sections we will look at (1) the computer as a conversational partner, (2) the computer as a butler or diary companion, (3) the computer as a teacher or a trainer, acting in a virtual training environment (a serious game), (4) sports applications (that are not necessarily different from serious game or education environments), and games and entertainment applications

Chatbot para la plataforma de participación ciudadana Decidim Barcelona

Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2023, Director: Inmaculada Rodríguez Santiago i Maite López Sánchez[en] Artificial Intelligence is in a moment of rapid growth in the implementation of different technologies. Among these technologies, the recent boom in the use of conversational agents, such as ChatGPT, stands out. We can observe that nowadays new chatbots with new and better functionalities are appearing every day, and every day, these functionalities are becoming more similar to the capabilities of a human being. This final degree project is an initiation to the world of conversational agents that allows in the first instance to identify their potential to be able to exploit them with the help of a conversational framework that allows to create chatbots. Specifically, in this project we have used the conversational framework RASA. On the other hand, we are living in an era where everyone is connected thanks to the Internet. As a consequence, virtual communities have come to light. These virtual communities are defined as a group of people with common goals who interact with each other in an online environment. Such virtual communities, like Artificial Intelligence, will be something we will see more commonly in the near future. In this context, using as a basis a previous TFG that formalized virtual communities, as well as the figure of a chatbot in them, this project proposes the inclusion of a conversational agent in a virtual community specialized in participatory democracy, so that it helps citizens to know it and to participate democratically in the decisions that affect their community. Specifically, this work focuses on the virtual community of Decidim.barcelona. This is a community of citizen participation that aims to improve the city of Barcelona through participatory processes such as participatory budgets, citizen assemblies, debates or collection of signatures

On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans

Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development

Designing and Implementing Embodied Agents: Learning from Experience

In this paper, we provide an overview of part of our experience in designing and implementing some of the embodied agents and talking faces that we have used for our research into human computer interaction. We focus on the techniques that were used and evaluate this with respect to the purpose that the agents and faces were to serve and the costs involved in producing and maintaining the software. We discuss the function of this research and development in relation to the educational programme of our graduate students