Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

E-Drama: Facilitating Online Role-play using an AI Actor and Emotionally Expressive Characters.

This paper describes a multi-user role-playing environment, e-drama, which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. The starting point of this research – edrama – is a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static cartoon figures. An application has been developed to enable integration of the existing edrama tool with several new components to support avatars with emotionally expressive behaviours, rendered in a 3D environment. The functionality includes the extraction of affect from open-ended improvisational text. The results of the affective analysis are then used to: (a) control an automated improvisational AI actor – EMMA (emotion, metaphor and affect) that operates a bit-part character in the improvisation; (b) drive the animations of avatars using the Demeanour framework in the user interface so that they react bodily in ways that are consistent with the affect that they are expressing. Finally, we describe user trials that demonstrate that the changes made improve the quality of social interaction and users’ sense of presence. Moreover, our system has the potential to evolve normal classroom education for young people with or without learning disabilities by providing 24/7 efficient personalised social skill, language and career training via role-play and offering automatic monitoring

On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces

Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information. However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable and affective multimodal interfaces

eDrama: Facilitating online role-play using emotionally expressive avatars.

Introduction: This paper describes the results of a user study of a multi-user role-playing environment ‘edrama’, which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. Hi8us’ edrama system is a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static cartoon like avatars. An application has been developed to enable the integration of the existing edrama tool with several new software components to support avatars with emotionally expressive behaviours, rendered in a 3D environment. In this paper we describe a user trial that demonstrates that the changes made improve the quality of social interaction and users' sense of presence

Affective Computing

This book provides an overview of state of the art research in Affective Computing. It presents new ideas, original results and practical experiences in this increasingly important research field. The book consists of 23 chapters categorized into four sections. Since one of the most important means of human communication is facial expression, the first section of this book (Chapters 1 to 7) presents a research on synthesis and recognition of facial expressions. Given that we not only use the face but also body movements to express ourselves, in the second section (Chapters 8 to 11) we present a research on perception and generation of emotional expressions by using full-body motions. The third section of the book (Chapters 12 to 16) presents computational models on emotion, as well as findings from neuroscience research. In the last section of the book (Chapters 17 to 22) we present applications related to affective computing

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