Engaging virtual agents

Embodied virtual assistants normally don’t engage the user emotionally. They fulfil their functions, e.g. as shopping assistants or virtual teachers, factually and emotionless. This way, they do not explore the full potential of the presence of an embodied character. In real life, the personality of the teacher or salesperson, their ability to involve and even to entertain is essential for their success. But how much of these “soft factors” can be translated into behaviour of virtual agents? Which kinds of virtual personalities are appropriate for which group, and in which context? We call virtual agents with engaging “soft skills” Engaging Virtual Agents. This paper presents a software platform employed for experimenting with soft skills and for creating different personalities of virtual agents. The focus of this platform is on authoring principles that facilitate the cooperation of content creators and computer scientists. We also present “Julie”, an example that was shortly concluded as part of a research project commissioned by SAP AG. Julie is a virtual sales assistant that employs actively emotional expressions and narrative techniques, in order to provide additional motivation for the customer to visit and to remain at the virtual shop

PENGARUH POPULASI DAN PEMBERIAN PUPUK BIO SLURRY KOTORAN SAPI PADA PERTUMBUHAN DAN HASIL TANAMAN OKRA (Abelmoschus Esculentu L. Moench)

This study aims to 1) To determine the interaction of organic fertilizers and plant spacing on the growth and production of okra plants. 2) To determine the best dose of organic fertilizer on the growth and production of okra plants. 3) To determine the appropriate planting spacing for the growth and production of okra plants. This research was conducted using factorial randomized block design (RBD) with 2 factors, the first factor was plant spacing (A) consisting of 3 levels, namely: 60x40 cm (A1), 60x50 cm (A2), 60x60 cm (A3) . The second factor was the dose of organic fertilizer (J) which consists of 3 levels, namely 5 tons / ha-1 (J1), 10 tons ha-1 (J2), 15 kg ha-1 (J3). The variables observed included plant height, stem diameter, number of leaves, total pods, total pod weight and pod quality. Data were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) level of 5% and further testing with Duncan's Multiple Range Test (DMRT). The results showed that: There was no significant interaction between organic fertilizer dosage and plant spacing on the growth and production of okra plants. Dosage treatment of organic fertilizer Bio slurry 15 Ton ha-1 (A3) significantly affected plant height, stem diameter, the highest plant height of 55.6411, 72.5322 and 77.0889 at the age of 6.7 and 8 MST. The highest stem diameter is 0.8689, 1.7844, 2.1289, 2, 0789 at the age of 3,6,7 and 8 MST. the best number of leaves is 27,706 age 8 MST. The treatment of plant spacing of 60x40 cm (A1) had a significant effect on the total number of pods and total pod weight, the total number of pods was 23.8569 and the total pod weight was 275.85 g in all harvest

Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

Universal Event and Motion Editor for Robots\u27 Theatre

Most of work on motion of mobile robots is to generate plans for avoiding obstacles or perform some meaningful and useful actions. In modern robot theatres and entertainment robots the motions of the robot are scripted and thus the performance or behavior of the robot is always the same. In this work we want to propose a new approach to robot motion generation. We want our robot to behave more like real people. People do not move in mechanical way like robots. When a human is supposed to execute some motion, these motions are similar to one another but always slightly or not so slightly different. We want to reproduce this property based on the introduced by us new concept of probabilistic regular expression, a method to describe sets of interrelated similar actions instead of single actions. Our goal is not only to create motions for humanoid robots that will look more naturally and less mechanically, but also to program robots that will combine basic movements from certain library in many different and partially random ways. While the basic motions were created ahead of time, their combinations are specified in our new language. Although now our method is only for motions and does not take inputs from sensors into account, in future the language can be extended to input/output sequences, thus the robot will be able to adapt the motion in different ways, to some sets of sequences of input stimuli. The inputs will come from sensors, possibly attached to limbs of controlling humans from whom the patterns of motion will be acquired