Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions

Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe

Emergent Story Generation: Lessons from Improvisational Theater

An emergent approach to story generation by computer is characterized by a lack of predetermined plot and a focus on character interaction forming the material for stories. A potential problem is that no interesting story emerges. However, improvisational theater shows that – at least for human actors – a predetermined plot is not necessary for creating a compelling story. There are some principles that make a successful piece of improvisational theater more than a random interaction, and these principles may inform the type of computational processes that an emergent narrative architecture draws from. We therefore discuss some of these principles, and show how these are explicitly or implicitly used in story generation and interactive storytelling research. Finally we draw lessons from these principles and ask attention for two techniques that have been little investigated: believably incorporating directives, and late commitment

A conceptual framework for interactive virtual storytelling

This paper presents a framework of an interactive storytelling system. It can integrate five components: management centre, evaluation centre, intelligent virtual agent, intelligent virtual environment, and users, making possible interactive solutions where the communication among these components is conducted in a rational and intelligent way. Environment plays an important role in providing heuristic information for agents through communicating with the management centre. The main idea is based on the principle of heuristic guiding of the behaviour of intelligent agents for guaranteeing the unexpectedness and consistent themes

Synthetic character fidelity through non-verbal behaviour in computer games

Artificial Intelligence in games has historically focused on providing a challenging opponent for a player and narrative development. Scope exists to increase the fidelity of synthetic characters throughout the game to create a more immersive game play experience. This requires both visual and behavioural fidelity, and while graphics are nearing photorealism, synthetic characters' behaviour is still unrealistic. Non-verbal behaviour of synthetic characters has to date received little attention and so the scope and participants of non-verbal behaviour requires identification. We review the range of spatial and task scenarios relevant in a game context, then identify categories of non-verbal behaviour and go on tot summarise their role in communication and propose their incorporation in the design of non-player characters. Finally we review how non-verbal behaviour of synthetic agents might increase immersion for a player and identify interaction techniques that might facilitate non-verbal communication with players and non-players characters alike

Psychological Aspects in lifelike synthetic agents: Towards to the Personality Markup Language (A Brief Survey)

This paper describes how human psychological aspects have been used in lifelike synthetic agents in order to provide believability during the human-computer interaction. We describe a brief survey of applications where Affective Computing Scientists have applied psychological aspects, like Emotion and Personality. Based on those aspects we describe the effort done by Affective Computing scientists in order to create a Markup Language to express and standardize Emotions. Because they have not yet concentrated their effort on Personality, here, we propose a starting point to create a Markup Language to express Personality

Comprehensive Believable Non Player Characters Creation and Management Tools for Emergent Gameplay

This thesis seeks a way to integrate popular psychosocial components required for believability to build a believable Non Player Characters (NPCs) model using the techniques of emergence. The believable NPCs model is scalable in terms of psychosocial models, customizable, flexible and data-driven. Comprehensive believable NPCs creation and management tools were developed to compose, generate, and maintain the system configuration data, as well as NPC profile data, using XML. Furthermore, a run-time prototype has been developed based on our proposed model to test its effectiveness. The prototype has also been evaluated for believable emergent behaviours in different social scenarios