I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

Language engineering - a champion for European culture

Language is key to culture. It is a direct cultural medium as well as a means of recording and providing access to non-lingual elements of culture. Language is also fundamental to a sense of cultural identity. For this reason, it is vital, in a changing Europe, that we preserve the multi-lingual character of our society in order to move successfully towards closer co-operation at a political, economic, and social level. Language engineering is the application of knowledge of language to the development of computer software which can recognise, understand, interpret, and generate human language in all its forms. The paper provides a high level view of the ‘state of the art’ in language engineering and indicates ways in which it will have a profound impact on our culture in the future. It shows how advances in language engineering are an important aid in maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-lingual European society, while enabling the development of social cohesion across cultural and national divides. It addresses issues raised by the prospect of the Multi-lingual Information Society, including education, human communication with technology and information management, as well as aspects of digital cities such as tele-presence in digital libraries, virtual art galleries and electronic museums. The paper raises the issue of language as a factor in cultural domination, showing the contribution that language engineering can make towards countering it. The paper also raises a number of controversial issues concerning the likely benefits arising from the ways in which language is likely to influence the culture of Europe

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

The design of speech-based automated mobile phone services using interface metaphors

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Interface metaphor is a widely used design technique for interactive computer systems. The advantages of using interface metaphors derive from their ability to promote active learning, which enables a user to transfer knowledge from a familiar real world domain, to an unfamiliar computing domain. Interface metaphor is not currently used for the design of automated phone services, and it was the aim of this thesis to examine whether interface metaphor could improve the usability of speech-activated automated mobile phone services. A human-centred design methodology was followed to generate, select, and develop potential metaphors, which were used to implement metaphor-based phone services. An experimental methodology was then used to compare the usability of the metaphor-based services with the usability of currently available number-based phone services. The first experiment examined the effect of three different interface metaphors on the usability of a mobile city guide service. Usability was measured as a range of performance and attitude measures, and was supplemented by telephone interview data. After three consecutive days of usage, participants both preferred, and performed better with, the service that was based on an office filing system metaphor. Experiment two was conducted over a six week period, and investigated the effect of users' individual differences, and the context of use, on the usability of both the office filing system metaphor-based service, and a non-metaphor service. The results showed that performance with the metaphor-based service was significantly better than performance with the non-metaphor service. The usability of the metaphor-based service was not significantly affected by users' individual characteristics and aptitudes, whereas the number-based service was, suggesting that metaphor-based services may be more usable for a wider range of potential users. Usability levels for both services were found to be consistent across both private and public locations of use, suggesting that speech-activated mobile phone services provide a flexible means of information access. Experiment three investigated the strategies used by participants when interacting with mobile phone services, specifically the visualisation strategy that was used by two thirds of the metaphor-based service participants in experiment two. In addition to the attitude and performance measures used for experiments one and two, face-to face interviews were conducted with participants. The results indicated that significantly more participants visualised the metaphor-based services relative to a non-metaphor service, and that visualisation of the service structure led to significant performance improvements. This thesis has demonstrated the usability benefits of interface metaphor as a design technique for speech-based mobile phone services. These benefits of metaphor appear to derive from their ability to provide a mental model of the phone service that can be visualised, and their ability to accommodate the individual differences of users

Voice Operated Information System in Slovak

Speech communication interfaces (SCI) are nowadays widely used in several domains. Automated spoken language human-computer interaction can replace human-human interaction if needed. Automatic speech recognition (ASR), a key technology of SCI, has been extensively studied during the past few decades. Most of present systems are based on statistical modeling, both at the acoustic and linguistic levels. Increased attention has been paid to speech recognition in adverse conditions recently, since noise-resistance has become one of the major bottlenecks for practical use of speech recognizers. Although many techniques have been developed, many challenges still have to be overcome before the ultimate goal -- creating machines capable of communicating with humans naturally -- can be achieved. In this paper we describe the research and development of the first Slovak spoken language dialogue system. The dialogue system is based on the DARPA Communicator architecture. The proposed system consists of the Galaxy hub and telephony, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, backend, transport and VoiceXML dialogue management modules. The SCI enables multi-user interaction in the Slovak language. Functionality of the SLDS is demonstrated and tested via two pilot applications, ``Weather forecast for Slovakia'' and ``Timetable of Slovak Railways''. The required information is retrieved from Internet resources in multi-user mode through PSTN, ISDN, GSM and/or VoIP network

Using the Internet to improve university education: Problem-oriented web-based learning and the MUNICS environment

Up to this point, university education has largely remained unaffected by the developments of novel approaches to web-based learning. The paper presents a principled approach to the design of problem-oriented, web-based learning at the university level. The principles include providing authentic contexts with multimedia, supporting collaborative knowledge construction, making thinking visible with dynamic visualisation, quick access to content resources via Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and flexible support by tele-tutoring. These principles are used in the Munich Net-based Learning In Computer Science (MUNICS) learning environment, which is designed to support students of computer science to apply their factual knowledge from the lectures to complex real-world problems. For example, students can model the knowledge management in an educational organisation with a graphical simulation tool. Some more general findings from a formative evaluation study with the MUNICS prototype are reported and discussed. E.g., the students' ignorance of the additional content resources is discussed in the light of the well-known finding of insufficient use of help systems in software applicationsBislang wurden neuere Ansätze zum web-basierten Lernen in nur geringem Maße zur Verbesserung des Universitätsstudiums genutzt. Es werden theoretisch begründete Prinzipien für die Gestaltung problemorientierter, web-basierter Lernumgebungen an der Universität formuliert. Zu diesen Prinzipien gehören die Nutzung von Multimedia-Technologien für die Realisierung authentischer Problemkontexte, die Unterstützung der gemeinsamen Wissenskonstruktion, die dynamische Visualisierung, der schnelle Zugang zu weiterführenden Wissensressourcen mit Hilfe von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien sowie die flexible Unterstützung durch Teletutoring. Diese Prinzipien wurden bei der Gestaltung der MUNICS Lernumgebung umgesetzt. MUNICS soll Studierende der Informatik bei der Wissensanwendung im Kontext komplexer praktischer Problemstellungen unterstützen. So können die Studierenden u.a. das Wissensmanagement in einer Bildungsorganisation mit Hilfe eines graphischen Simulationswerkzeugs modellieren. Es werden Ergebnisse einer formativen Evaluationsstudie berichtet und diskutiert. Beispielsweise wird die in der Studie festgestellte Ignoranz der Studierenden gegenüber den weiterführenden Wissensressourcen vor dem Hintergrund des häufig berichteten Befunds der unzureichenden Nutzung von Hilfesystemen beleuchte