Towards Communicating Agents and Avatars in Virtual Worlds

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. In addition, in a multi-user version of the system visitors can chat with each other. Our environment is a laboratory for research and for experiments with users interacting with agents in multimodal ways, referring to visualized information and making use of knowledge possessed by domain agents, but also by agents that represent other visitors of this environment. We discuss standards that are under development for designing such environments. Our environment models a local theatre in our hometown. We discuss our attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors buying tickets, but also visitors that that are not yet sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around, talk with others, etc. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multi-agent environment to realize our goals and that we need to have a unifying framework in order to be able to introduce and maintain different agents and user avatars with different abilities, including intellectual, interaction and animation abilities

TwNC: a Multifaceted Dutch News Corpus

This contribution describes the Twente News Corpus (TwNC), a multifaceted corpus for Dutch that is being deployed in a number of NLP research projects among which tracks within the Dutch national research programme MultimediaN, the NWO programme CATCH, and the Dutch-Flemish programme STEVIN.\ud \ud The development of the corpus started in 1998 within a predecessor project DRUID and has currently a size of 530M words. The text part has been built from texts of four different sources: Dutch national newspapers, television subtitles, teleprompter (auto-cues) files, and both manually and automatically generated broadcast news transcripts along with the broadcast news audio. TwNC plays a crucial role in the development and evaluation of a wide range of tools and applications for the domain of multimedia indexing, such as large vocabulary speech recognition, cross-media indexing, cross-language information retrieval etc. Part of the corpus was fed into the Dutch written text corpus in the context of the Dutch-Belgian STEVIN project D-COI that was completed in 2007. The sections below will describe the rationale that was the starting point for the corpus development; it will outline the cross-media linking approach adopted within MultimediaN, and finally provide some facts and figures about the corpus

Preface

These are the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN 09). The first edition of this conference, organised in Madonna di Campiglio, saw the gathering of a diverse audience with broad and varied interests. With presentations on topics ranging from underlying technology to intelligent interaction and entertainment applications, several inspiring invited lectures, a demonstration session and a hands-on design garage, that first edition of INTETAIN generated a lot of interaction between participants in a lively atmosphere. We hope that we have managed to continue this direction with the third edition, which will take place in Amsterdam, following the second edition held in Cancun. The submissions for short and long papers this year show a certain focus on topics such as emergent games, exertion interfaces and embodied interaction, but also cover important topics of the previous editions, such as, affective user interfaces, story telling, sensors, tele-presence in entertainment, animation, edutainment, and (interactive) art. The presentation of the accepted papers, together with the many interactive demonstrations of entertainment and art installations, and other participative activities to be held during the conference, should go some way towards recreating the open and interactive atmosphere that has been the goal of INTETAIN since its beginning. In addition to the aforementioned papers and demonstrations, we are happy to present contributions from three excellent invited speakers for INTETAIN 09. Matthias Rauterberg of Eindhoven University, in his contribution titled “Entertainment Computing, Social Transformation and the Quantum Field��?, takes a broad view as he discusses positive aspects of entertainment computing regarding its capacity for social transformation. Michael Mateas, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, talks about his work in interactive art and storytelling. Antonio Camurri, of InfoMus Lab, Genova, discusses an approach to Human Music Interaction that assigns a more active role to users listening to and interacting with music, in his contribution titled “Non-verbal full body emotional and social interaction: a case study on multimedia systems for active music listening��?

Oxidative Stress Inactivates Cobalamin-Independent Methionine Synthase (MetE) in Escherichia coli

In nature, Escherichia coli are exposed to harsh and non-ideal growth environments—nutrients may be limiting, and cells are often challenged by oxidative stress. For E. coli cells confronting these realities, there appears to be a link between oxidative stress, methionine availability, and the enzyme that catalyzes the final step of methionine biosynthesis, cobalamin-independent methionine synthase (MetE). We found that E. coli cells subjected to transient oxidative stress during growth in minimal medium develop a methionine auxotrophy, which can be traced to an effect on MetE. Further experiments demonstrated that the purified enzyme is inactivated by oxidized glutathione (GSSG) at a rate that correlates with protein oxidation. The unique site of oxidation was identified by selectively cleaving N-terminally to each reduced cysteine and analyzing the results by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Stoichiometric glutathionylation of MetE by GSSG occurs at cysteine 645, which is strategically located at the entrance to the active site. Direct evidence of MetE oxidation in vivo was obtained from thiol-trapping experiments in two different E. coli strains that contain highly oxidizing cytoplasmic environments. Moreover, MetE is completely oxidized in wild-type E. coli treated with the thiol-oxidizing agent diamide; reduced enzyme reappears just prior to the cells resuming normal growth. We argue that for E. coli experiencing oxidizing conditions in minimal medium, MetE is readily inactivated, resulting in cellular methionine limitation. Glutathionylation of the protein provides a strategy to modulate in vivo activity of the enzyme while protecting the active site from further damage, in an easily reversible manner. While glutathionylation of proteins is a fairly common mode of redox regulation in eukaryotes, very few proteins in E. coli are known to be modified in this manner. Our results are complementary to the independent findings of Leichert and Jakob presented in the accompanying paper (Leichert and Jakob 2004), which provide evidence that MetE is one of the proteins in E. coli most susceptible to oxidation. In eukaryotes, glutathionylation of key proteins involved in protein synthesis leads to inhibition of translation. Our studies suggest a simpler mechanism is employed by E. coli to achieve the same effect

Bundeling van conferentieverslagen

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Dialogues with a talking face for web-based services and transactions

In this paper we discuss our research on interactions in a virtual theatre that has been built using VRML and therefore can be accessed through Web pages. In\ud the virtual environment we employ several agents. The virtual theatre allows navigation input through keyboard and mouse, but there is also a navigation\ud agent which listens to typed input and spoken commands. Feedback of the system is given using speech synthesis. We also have an information agent which allows a natural language dialogue with the system where the input is keyboard-driven and the output is both with tables as with template driven natural language generation. In development are several talking faces for the different agents in the virtual world. At this moment an avatar with a cartoon-like talking face driven by a text-to-speech synthesizer can provide users with information about performances in the theatre

A multimodal interaction system for navigation

To help users find their way in a virtual theatre we developed a navigation agent. In natural language dialogue the agent assists users looking for the location of an object or room, and it shows routes between locations. The speech-based dialogue system allows users to ask questions such as “Where is the coffee bar?” and “How do I get to the great hall?” The agent has a map and can mark locations and routes; users can click on locations and ask questions about them