1,949 research outputs found
A Creative Exploration of the Use of Intelligent Agents in Spatial Narrative Structures
This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of authoring tools for creating spatial narrative structuresâ exposing the relationship between artists, the tools they use, and the experiences they create. It is a research-creation enterprise resulting in the creation of a new authoring tool. A prototype collaborative tool for authoring spatial narratives used at the Land|Slide: Possible Futures public art exhibit in Markham, Ontario 2013 is described. Using narrative analysis of biographical information a cultural context for authoring and experiencing spatial narrative structures is discussed. The biographical information of artists using digital technologies is posited as a context framing for usability design heuristics. The intersection of intelligent agents and spatial narrative structures provide a future scenario by which to assess the suitability of the approach outlined in this study
Towards a crowdsourced solution for the authoring bottleneck in interactive narratives
Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be
employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes
a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led
to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise
the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty
of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of
story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically
and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a
scalability problem.
This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature
survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already
shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers
with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be
an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach,
this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in
order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically
and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis
modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers.
Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different
approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and
are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog
between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from
previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers
in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that
combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring
are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring
effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the
effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach
A generic architecture for interactive intelligent tutoring systems
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 07/06/2001.This research is focused on developing a generic intelligent architecture for an interactive tutoring system. A review of the literature in the areas of instructional theories, cognitive and social views of learning, intelligent tutoring systems development methodologies, and knowledge representation methods was conducted. As a result, a generic ITS development architecture (GeNisa) has been proposed, which combines the features of knowledge base systems (KBS) with object-oriented methodology. The GeNisa architecture consists of the following components: a tutorial events communication module, which encapsulates the interactive processes and other independent computations between different components; a software design toolkit; and an autonomous knowledge acquisition from a probabilistic knowledge base. A graphical application development environment includes tools to support application development, and learning environments and which use a case scenario as a basis for instruction. The generic architecture is designed to support client-side execution in a Web browser environment, and further testing will show that it can disseminate applications over the World Wide Web. Such an architecture can be adapted to different teaching styles and domains, and reusing instructional materials automatically can reduce the effort of the courseware developer (hence cost and time) in authoring new materials. GeNisa was implemented using Java scripts, and subsequently evaluated at various commercial and academic organisations. Parameters chosen for the evaluation include quality of courseware, relevancy of case scenarios, portability to other platforms, ease of use, content, user-friendliness, screen display, clarity, topic interest, and overall satisfaction with GeNisa. In general, the evaluation focused on the novel characteristics and performances of the GeNisa architecture in comparison with other ITS and the results obtained are discussed and analysed.
On the basis of the experience gained during the literature research and GeNisa development and evaluation. a generic methodology for ITS development is proposed as well as the requirements for the further development of ITS tools. Finally, conclusions are drawn and areas for further research are identified
Feasible database querying using a visual end-user approach
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1822018.1822047Querying databases is a common daily task carried out by a great deal of end-users who do not have specific skills in SQL language. Today, most of the database interaction is achieved by means of query interfaces provided by the database environment. However, most of these interfaces suffer from expressive limitations, since they are mostly based on metaphors that drastically restrict the expressiveness of the SQL language that is generated and executed in the background. In this paper, we present a visual interaction language and tool focused on easily querying databases by end-users. We make no assumption on the level of the user's experience with query languages, as our visual metaphor is intended for querying databases by unskilled end-users and also leveraging the restriction on the expressiveness of the queries created by them. We also report on some late braking results obtained by an experiment carried out with real users.The work reported in this paper is being partially supported by the founded projects TIN2008-02081/TIN and S2009/TIC-1650
Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author
The question motivating this review paper is, how can
computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn-
ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to
link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory,
and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional
question driving research in interactive narrative is, âhow can an in-
teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while
maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?â This question
derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that,
as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency.
Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip-
ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based
on Brechtâs Epic Theatre and Boalâs Theatre of the Oppressed are
reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the
conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question
that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional
question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in-
teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity
Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001
This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences
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