Hawaiʻi Space Exploration Analog and Simulation

This item includes a video recording of a Mānoa Faculty Lecture Series presentation that took place in the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Library and also a flyer for that presentation.HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, www.hi-seas.org) is a habitat on an isolated Mars-like site on the Mauna Loa side of the saddle area on the Big Island of Hawai‘i at approximately 8200 feet above sea level. Here, crews of six people live and work through long-duration simulations of Mars exploration missions (four, eight and twelve month long). This research aims to answer several critical questions to prepare for extended space exploration, including: • How should the crew be selected? • What skillsets will they need? • How should they be trained? • How can we best monitor their physical and psychological health? • What should we do if a problem arises? Our goal is to help NASA remove barriers to the human exploration of Mars

Machine humour: An implemented model of puns

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsThis thesis describes a formal model of a subtype of humour, and the implementation of that model in a program that generates jokes of that subtype. Although there is a great deal of literature on humour in general, very little formal work has been done on puns, and none has been implemented. All current linguistic theories of humour are over-general and not falsifiable. Our model, which is specific, formal, implemented and evaluated, makes a significant contribution to the field. Punning riddles are our chosen subtype of verbal humour, for several reasons. They are very common, they exhibit certain regular structures and mechanisms, and they have been studied previously by linguists. Our model is based on our extensive analysis of large numbers of punning riddles, taken from children's joke books. The implementation of the model, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), generates punning riddles, from a humour independent lexicon. Pun generation requires much less world knowledge than pun comprehension, making it feasible for implementation. To support our claim that all of JAPE's output is punning riddles, we conducted an evaluatory experiment. We took JAPE texts, human-generated texts, nonsense non-jokes and sensible non-jokes, and asked joke experts to evaluate them. For joke experts, we used 8-11 year old children, since psychological research suggests that this age group enjoys, and can recognize, punning riddles better than other age groups. The results showed that JAPE's output texts are, in fact, recognizably jokes. The evaluation showed that our model adequately describes a significant subtype of verbal humour. We believe that this model can now be expanded to cover puns in general, as well as other types of linguistic humour

Character Design for Soccer Commentary

. In this paper we present early work on an animated talking head commentary system called Byrne 1 . The goal of this project is to develop a system which can take the output from the RoboCup soccer simulator, and generate appropriate affective speech and facial expressions, based on the character's personality, emotional state, and the state of play. Here we describe a system which takes pre-analysed simulator output as input, and which generates text marked-up for use by a speech generator and a face animation system. We make heavy use of inter-system standards, so that future versions of Byrne will be able to take advantage of advances in the technologies that it incorporates. 1 Introduction Many natural systems have behaviour complex enough that people will tend to ascribe personalities to them, and use those personalities as flawed but powerfully predictive tools. For example, we might summarize a dog's behavioral tendencies as "eager to please" or "yappy and spoiled", and use ..

A Talking Head Architecture for Entertainment and Experimentation

Byrne is a talking head system, developed with two goals in mind: to allow artists to create entertaining characters with strong personalities, expressed through speech and facial animation; and to allow cognitive scientists to implement and test theories of emotion and expression. In this extended abstract, we emphasize the latter aim. We describe Byrne's design, and discuss some ways in which it could be used in affect-related experiments. Byrne's first domain is football commentary; that is, Byrne provides an emotionally expressive running commentary on a RoboCup simulation league football game. We will give examples from this domain throughout this paper. Background Contributing technologies, such as speech synthesis and facial animation, are now sufficiently advanced that talking heads --- systems which combine facial animation with speech synthesis --- can be built. To date, most have been built from scratch, with the aim of demonstrating some particular theory (e.g. (Pelachaud..