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

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS IN THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

The terminology used in the newly emerging field called “behavioural economics” and some of its contributors are discussed in this paper. Behavioural economics, in the primal used way of payment for the hospital care providers called DRGs, is discussed along three subsections of this research with some representations in the domain. In many situations, behavioural economics becomes economic psychology. Some of the psychological factors that impact over the economic agents in the health system are established and the key performance indicators of knowledge of any hospital are identified and calculated in this paper to provide an overview in this area. They were subject to statistical mathematical analysis to determine the confidence interval for the average length of stay of a surgical profile department. A series of conclusions were made at the end of this study leaving the session open for the future survey

Distribution-based iterative pairwise classification of emotions in the wild using LGBP-TOP

Automatic facial expression analysis promises to be a game- changer in many application areas. But before this promise can be fulfilled, it has to move from the laboratory into the wild. The Emotion Recognition in the Wild challenge pro- vides an opportunity to develop approaches in this direction. We propose a novel Distribution-based Pairwise Iterative Classification scheme, which outperforms standard multi- class classification on this challenge data. We also verify that the recently proposed dynamic appearance descriptor, Local Gabor Patterns on Three Orthogonal Planes, performs well on this real-world data, indicating that it is robust to the type of facial misalignments that can be expected in such scenarios. Finally, we provide details of ACTC, our affective computing tools on the cloud, which is a new resource for researchers in the field of affective computing

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

Ask Alice: an artificial retrieval of information agent

We present a demonstration of the ARIA framework, a modular approach for rapid development of virtual humans for information retrieval that have linguistic, emotional, and social skills and a strong personality. We demonstrate the framework’s capabilities in a scenario where ‘Alice in Wonderland’, a popular English literature book, is embodied by a virtual human representing Alice. The user can engage in an information exchange dialogue, where Alice acts as the expert on the book, and the user as an interested novice. Besides speech recognition, sophisticated audio-visual behaviour analysis is used to inform the core agent dialogue module about the user’s state and intentions, so that it can go beyond simple chat-bot dialogue. The behaviour generation module features a unique new capability of being able to deal gracefully with interruptions of the agent

Ten Years of Marks & Spencer

We present a demonstration of the ARIA framework, a modular approach for rapid development of virtual humans for information retrieval that have linguistic, emotional, and social skills and a strong personality. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework in a scenario where a popular book from the English literature, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, is embodied by a virtual human called Alice. During the presentation one can engage in an information exchange dialogue, where Alice acts as the expert on the book, and the user as an interested novice. Besides speech recognition, sophisticated audio-visual behaviour analysis is used to inform the core agent dialogue module about the user’s state and intentions, so that it can go beyond simple chat-bot dialogue. The behaviour generation module features a unique new capability of being able to deal gracefully with interruptions of the agent