Agents, Believability and Embodiment in Advanced Learning Environments

On the World Wide Web we see a growing number of general HCI interfaces, interfaces to educational or entertainment systems, interfaces to professional environments, etc., where an animated face, a cartoon character or a human-like virtual agent has the task to assist the user, to engage the user into a conversation or to educate the user. What can be said say about the effects a human-like agent has on a student's performance? We discuss agents, their intelligence, embodiment and interaction modalities. In particular, we introduce viewpoints and questions about roles embodied agents can play in educational environment

Mascaret: Pedagogical multi-agents system for virtual environment for training.

International audienceThis study concerns virtual environments for training in operational conditions. The principal developed idea is that these environments are heterogeneous and open multi-agent systems. The MASCARET model is proposed to organize the interactions between agents and to provide them reactive, cognitive and social abilities to simulate the physical and social environment. The physical environment represents, in a realistic way, the phenomena that learners and teachers have to take into account. The social environment is simulated by agents executing collaborative and adaptive tasks. These agents realize, in team, procedures that they have to adapt to the environment. The users participate to the training environment through their avatar. In this article, we explain how we integrated, in MASCARET, models necessary to the creation of Intelligent Tutoring System. We notably incorporate pedagogical strategies and pedagogical actions. We present pedagogical agents. To validate our model, the SÉCURÉVI application for fire-fighters training is developed

Supporting Constructive Learning with a Feedback Planner

A promising approach to constructing more effective computer tutors is implementing tutorial strategies that extend over multiple turns. This means that computer tutors must deal with (1) failure, (2) interruptions, (3) the need to revise their tactics, and (4) basic dialogue phenomena such as acknowledgment. To deal with these issues, we need to combine ITS technology with advances from robotics and computational linguistics. We can use reactive planning techniques from robotics to allow us to modify tutorial plans, adapting them to student input. Computational linguistics will give us guidance in handling communication management as well as building a reusable architecture for tutorial dialogue systems. A modular and reusable architecture is critical given the difficulty in constructing tutorial dialogue systems and the many domains to which we would like to apply them. In this paper, we propose such an architecture and discuss how a reactive planner in the context of this architecture can implement multi-turn tutorial strategies

Effective Tutoring with Empathic Embodied Conversational Agents

This thesis examines the prospect of using empathy in an Embodied Tutoring System (ETS) that guides students through an online quiz (by providing feedback on student answers and responding to self-reported student emotion). The ETS seeks to imitate human behaviours successfully used in one-to-one human tutorial interactions. The main hypothesis is that the interaction with an empathic ETS results in greater learning gains than a neutral ETS, primarily by encouraging positive and reducing negative student emotions using empathic feedback. In a preparatory study we investigated different strategies for expressing emotion by the ETS. We established that a multimodal strategy achieves the best results regarding how accurately human participants can recognise the emotions. This approach was used in developing the feedback strategy for our empathic ETS. The preparatory study was followed by two studies in which we compared a neutral with an empathic ETS. The ETS in the second of these studies was developed using results from the first of these studies. In both studies, we found no statistically significant difference in learning gains between the neutral and empathic ETS. However, we did discover a number of interactions between the ETS system, learning gains and, in particular 1) student scores on an empathic tendency test and 2) student ability. We also analysed the subjective responses and the relation between self-reported emotions during the quiz and student learning gains. Based on our studies in a formal class room setting, we assess the prospects of using empathic agents in a classroom setting and describe a number of requirements for their effective use

Evaluation of an anthropomorphic user interface in a travel reservation context and affordances

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number ofyears in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine theeffectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback in various domains. The results are of use to all interactivesystems designers, particularly when dealing with issues of user interface feedback design. There is currently somedisagreement amongst computer scientists concerning the suitability of such types of feedback. This research is working toresolve this disagreement. The experiment detailed, concerns the specific software domain of Online Factual Delivery in thespecific context of online hotel bookings. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphicfeedback. Statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that the non-anthropomorphic feedback was more effective.The results for user satisfaction were however less clear. The results obtained are compared with previous research. Thissuggests that the observed results could be due to the issue of differing domains yielding different results. However the resultsmay also be due to the affordances at the interface being more facilitated in the non-anthropomorphic feedback