Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

Motion Rail: A Virtual Reality Level Crossing Training Application

This paper presents the development and usability testing of a Virtual Reality (VR) based system named 'Motion Rail' for training children on railway crossing safety. The children are to use a VR head mounted device and a controller to navigate the VR environment to perform a level crossing task and they will receive instant feedback on pass or failure on a display in the VR environment. Five participants consisting of two male and three females were considered for the usability test. The outcomes of the test was promising, as the children were very engaging and will like to adopt this training approach in future safety training

Agents Behavior Semi-automatic Analysis through Their Comparison to Human Behavior Clustering

10 pages Online ISBN : 978-3-319-09767-1 Print ISBN : 978-3-319-09766-4International audienceThis paper presents a generic method to evaluate virtual agents that aim at reproducing humans behaviors in an immersive virtual environment. We first use automated clustering of simulation logs to extract humans behaviors. We then propose an aggregation of the agents logs into those clusters to analyze the credibility of agents behaviors in terms of capacities, lacks, and errors by comparing them to humans ones. We complete this analysis with a subjective evaluation based on a questionnaire filled by human annotators to draw categories of users, making their behaviors explicit. We illustrate this method in the context of immersive driving simulation

Integration, contextualisation and continuity: three themes for the development of effective music teacher education programs

[Abstract]: This paper reports the findings of a study exploring early-career music teachers’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their pre-service teacher education programs in Queensland, Australia. It also explores influences impacting upon early-career music teachers’ perceptions of effectiveness and early-career music teachers’ perceived needs in relation to their pre-service preparation. Findings suggest that pre-service teachers perceive a need for teacher education courses to be contextualised, integrated and allow for the continual development of knowledge and skills throughout their early years in schools. This research provides an empirical basis for reconceptualising music teacher education courses and raises important issues that music teacher educators need to address in order to ensure that graduates are adequately prepared for classroom music teaching

Simulation and HRI recent perspectives with the MORSE simulator

Simulation in robotics is often a love-hate relationship: while simulators do save us a lot of time and effort compared to regular deployment of complex software architectures on complex hardware, simulators are also known to evade many of the real issues that robots need to manage when they enter the real world. Because humans are the paragon of dynamic, unpredictable, complex, real world entities, simulation of human-robot interactions may look condemn to fail, or, in the best case, to be mostly useless. This collective article reports on five independent applications of the MORSE simulator in the field of human-robot interaction: It appears that simulation is already useful, if not essential, to successfully carry out research in the field of HRI, and sometimes in scenarios we do not anticipate. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland