- Computer Graphics, Simulation (Computer Science), Agent Based, Psychologically-Valid AI, Autonomous Cognitive Agents, Digital Stories, and 10 moreEntertainment Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Affective Systems, Computational Creativity, Computer Games Technology, Ambient Intelligence AmI (in ), AI Planning (Artificial Intelligence), Wearable Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, and Computer Scienceedit
This paper presents our experience of designing the educational collaborative role-play game ORIENT with a special focus on the multimodal interaction used in the game. The idea behind ORIENT is to try increasing a user's... more
This paper presents our experience of designing the educational collaborative role-play game ORIENT with a special focus on the multimodal interaction used in the game. The idea behind ORIENT is to try increasing a user's intercultural empathy through role-play set in a science fiction narrative in which the users have to befriend an alien race, the Sprytes. The Sprytes are virtual characters that communicate with the users through a mix of gestures and natural language. We explain how the choice and design of those output modalities ...
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Abstract. In this paper we describe BAMUVA. BAMUVA is Robot based behavioural architecture designed to create Intelligent Agents in a Virtual Environment, where each agent senses obstacles and other moving creatures in the environment and... more
Abstract. In this paper we describe BAMUVA. BAMUVA is Robot based behavioural architecture designed to create Intelligent Agents in a Virtual Environment, where each agent senses obstacles and other moving creatures in the environment and reacts to them. The architecture consists of a Behaviour layer, a motor layer and a library of sensors. Keywords: Agents, Virtual Environments, Behaviour robotics, CAVE, Maverik, Linux, OpenGL, Animation.
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In this paper we describe an emotional-behaviouralarchitecture. The emotional engine is a higherlayer than the behaviour system, and it can alterbehaviour patterns, the engines is designed to simulateEmotionally-Intelligent Agents in a... more
In this paper we describe an emotional-behaviouralarchitecture. The emotional engine is a higherlayer than the behaviour system, and it can alterbehaviour patterns, the engines is designed to simulateEmotionally-Intelligent Agents in a Virtual Environment, where each agent senses its own emotions, and other creature emotions through a virtual smellsensor; senses obstacles and other moving creatures inthe environment and reacts to them. The architectureconsists of an emotion engine, behaviour synthesissystem, a motor layer and ...
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The impetus for this field comes from a number of directions. Firstly, as the amount of processing power available for rendering has increased, it has now become feasible to devote a little of it to aspects of a VE beyond visual realism.... more
The impetus for this field comes from a number of directions. Firstly, as the amount of processing power available for rendering has increased, it has now become feasible to devote a little of it to aspects of a VE beyond visual realism. However visually appealing a VE is, if it is static and empty of change and behaviour, the immersive experience is of limited interest. Cities without people cannot make the user feel a real sense of presence. While animation can create dynamic interest, its pre-scripted nature runs against the interactional freedom a VE gives users and can only hold their interest for a limited time.
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We present a demonstration of the intelligent agent-based system ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology). We summarise the application domain: education for inter-cultural empathy; the technology used and... more
We present a demonstration of the intelligent agent-based system ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology). We summarise the application domain: education for inter-cultural empathy; the technology used and the innovations this involves; and finally interaction with ORIENT.
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Narrative, Role-playing Game Theory, Interactive Storytelling, and 10 moreIntelligent Agent, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligent, Fatima, Implementation, Facilitator, Gamemaster, Narrative Shaping, Story Facilitator, and IT Evaluation
This paper discusses the development of a believable agent-based educational application designed to develop inter-cultural empathy for 13-14 year old students. It considers relevant work in cultural taxonomy and adaptation to other... more
This paper discusses the development of a believable agent-based educational application designed to develop inter-cultural empathy for 13-14 year old students. It considers relevant work in cultural taxonomy and adaptation to other cultures as well as work showing that users are sensitive to the perceived culture of believable interactive characters. It discusses how an existing affective agent architecture was developed
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As virtual characters become more autonomous, their use in interactive drama is growing. By creating interesting and well authored personalities, these characters are able to interact with each other and create appealing non-scripted... more
As virtual characters become more autonomous, their use in interactive drama is growing. By creating interesting and well authored personalities, these characters are able to interact with each other and create appealing non-scripted stories. As with any other story, we may want to re-tell it or create a summary of the essential parts. Our goal was to create comic-like summaries
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Research Interests: Psychology, Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, Narrative, Entertainment Computing, and 10 moreInteractive Narrative, Puppetry as an Educational Tool, Empathy, Pervasive Game, Social and emotional learning, Communication and media Studies, Ethical Issues, Role play, Educational Tool, and Virtual agent
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Perception, Emotional Memory, Cognition, and 11 moreVideo Game, Role-playing Game Theory, Orient, Multi-Agent Systems and Autonomous Agents, Role play, Computer Game, Cognitive Appraisal, PSI Architecture, Affective Agents, Cultural Awareness, and Non Player Character(NPC)
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Woods, Mel and Sharples, Sarah and Sun, Xu and Aylett, Ruth and Stewart, Robert and Bental, Diana and Makri, Stephann and Blandford, Ann and Forth, Jamie and Wiggins, Geraint and Piao, Scott and Whittle, Jon (2011) Understanding... more
Woods, Mel and Sharples, Sarah and Sun, Xu and Aylett, Ruth and Stewart, Robert and Bental, Diana and Makri, Stephann and Blandford, Ann and Forth, Jamie and Wiggins, Geraint and Piao, Scott and Whittle, Jon (2011) Understanding Serendipity to Inform Novel Processes, Methods and Technologies for the Researcher. In: Digital Engagement 2011 Conference. UNSPECIFIED, Newcastle. ... Full text not available from this repository.
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Abstract: FearNot! is a novel software application aimed at the age-group of 8-12 year old students with the aim to influence their attitude towards and knowledge about bullying. It is a virtual learning environment for social and... more
Abstract: FearNot! is a novel software application aimed at the age-group of 8-12 year old students with the aim to influence their attitude towards and knowledge about bullying. It is a virtual learning environment for social and emotional learning that allows for individual interaction with synthetic autonomous characters that engage in bullying and ask the learner for help and advice in order to escape victimisation. FearNot! uses an emergent narrative approach that generates stories through the interaction of the learner with the autonomous ...
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This paper discusses the importance of emotion modelling if one is to deal with interactive drama. As a position paper, it describes the emotion mechanisms in place in traditional drama and considers the possibilities to transpose these... more
This paper discusses the importance of emotion modelling if one is to deal with interactive drama. As a position paper, it describes the emotion mechanisms in place in traditional drama and considers the possibilities to transpose these in regard to interactivity. We also, in this document, look with a critical eye at the necessary changes to be made in the general perception of drama, more particularly, the role of the user if dramatic enacting has to be rendered interactive. Beside the very muchdiscussed topic of narrative ...
Abstract: Addressing the problems of bullying in schools, this paper presents a novel and highly innovative pedagogical approach building on the immersive power of virtual role-play. Educational role-play is widely accepted as a powerful... more
Abstract: Addressing the problems of bullying in schools, this paper presents a novel and highly innovative pedagogical approach building on the immersive power of virtual role-play. Educational role-play is widely accepted as a powerful instrument to change attitudes and behaviour, but faces some difficulties and disadvantages when applied to sensitive social issues in the classroom. This paper shows how the FearNot! software application, developed within the scope of the EU-funded project eCIRCUS (Education through ...
Abstract: The FearNot! application demonstrator, currently being developed for the EU framework V project VICTEC, uses empathic agents as a basic mechanism for engaging children in anti-bullying education. The empathic agents are driven... more
Abstract: The FearNot! application demonstrator, currently being developed for the EU framework V project VICTEC, uses empathic agents as a basic mechanism for engaging children in anti-bullying education. The empathic agents are driven by an affective system in interactional dramas in which both physical actions and language actions are required. This paper focuses on the different sets of Speech Act inspired language action lists developed for the project and discusses their use for an interactive language and action system for ...
In this paper we present the initial conceptual design of an authoring tool for the emergent narrative agent architecture FAtiMA that powers the virtual bullying drama FearNot!. We explain that the process of authoring emergent narrative... more
In this paper we present the initial conceptual design of an authoring tool for the emergent narrative agent architecture FAtiMA that powers the virtual bullying drama FearNot!. We explain that the process of authoring emergent narrative to a large part consists of designing a planning domain for a virtual character planner and explain the difficulties this task poses to the non-technical author. After reviewing existing authoring tools and evaluating them in terms of their applicability to FAtiMA, we introduce a novel ...
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This paper discusses the requirements of planning for believable synthetic characters and examines the relationship between appraisal and planning as components of an affective agent architecture. It discusses an implementation in the... more
This paper discusses the requirements of planning for believable synthetic characters and examines the relationship between appraisal and planning as components of an affective agent architecture. It discusses an implementation in the synthetic characters of the FearNot! anti-bullying education demonstrator and how far this provides an adequate mechanism for believable behaviour.
We are pleased to present this special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are autonomous, graphically embodied agents in a dynamic social environment. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition... more
We are pleased to present this special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are autonomous, graphically embodied agents in a dynamic social environment. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action, which allows to them interact autonomously and intelligently with the environment, other IVAs, and especially with human users. Research on IVAs now encompasses a wide range of disciplines; artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, robotics, cognitive and social ...
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This paper describes a user-centered approach to designing a system enabling adults with autism spectrum disorder to engage in social skills training with a robot. This system will allow people to rehearse work-relevant social skills.... more
This paper describes a user-centered approach to designing a system enabling adults with autism spectrum disorder to engage in social skills training with a robot. This system will allow people to rehearse work-relevant social skills. Using its own internal models of social behavior, the system will provide feedback on the rehearsals, supporting users’ ability to learn from episodes of human-robot interaction.
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At the beginning of the new century, Information Technologies had become basic and indispensable constituents of the production and preparation processes for all kinds of goods and services and with that are largely influencing both the... more
At the beginning of the new century, Information Technologies had become basic and indispensable constituents of the production and preparation processes for all kinds of goods and services and with that are largely influencing both the working and private life of nearly every citizen. This development will continue and even further grow with the continually increasing use of the Internet in production, business, science, education, and everyday societal and private undertaking. Recent years have shown, however, that a dramatic enhancement of software capabilities is required, when aiming to continuously provide advanced and competitive products and services in all these fast developing sectors. It includes the development of intelligent systems – systems that are more autonomous, flexible, and robust than today’s conventional software. Intelligent Planning and Scheduling is a key enabling technology for intelligent systems. It has been developed and matured over the last three deca...
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In 2001, the EU-funded project VICTEC pioneered the concept of an Empathic Agent. This was reported at AAMAS in 2004 in a well-cited paper 'Caring for Agents and Agents that Care: Building Empathic Relations with Synthetic Agents'... more
In 2001, the EU-funded project VICTEC pioneered the concept of an Empathic Agent. This was reported at AAMAS in 2004 in a well-cited paper 'Caring for Agents and Agents that Care: Building Empathic Relations with Synthetic Agents' (Paiva, Dias, Sobral, Aylett, Sobreperez, Woods, Zoll, Hall). It advanced two goals for embodied empathic agents: characters that, by their actions and behaviours, are able to show empathy (or not) for other characters; and characters that, by their appearance, situation, and behaviour, are able to trigger empathic reactions in the user. In this talk we discuss how far Embodied Empathic Agents - whether graphical or robotic - are succeeding; what we can now do, and what open research questions remain. What are the key theoretical and technological advances already made and which are still needed? What applications are Empathic Agents `good' for, and how do we know they are? And how do they relate to the broader field of social agents?
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Significant work has been devoted to the design of artificial tutors with human capabilities with the aim of helping increase the efficiency achieved with a human instructor. Yet, these systems still lack the personal, empathic and human... more
Significant work has been devoted to the design of artificial tutors with human capabilities with the aim of helping increase the efficiency achieved with a human instructor. Yet, these systems still lack the personal, empathic and human elements that characterise a traditional teacher and fail to engage and motivate students in the same way a human teacher does. The EU-funded project EMOTE (EMbOdied-perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning) has recently started, and will continue until the end of 2015. The project aims to design, develop and evaluate a new generation of virtual and robotic embodied tutors that have perceptive capabilities to engage in empathic interactions with learners in a shared physical space. In this paper we wish to discuss the approach we are taking in the project as well as how the project may contribute to knowledge relevant for the Games-Based Learning community.
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The Great Deceivers: Virtual Agents and Believable Lies Jo˜ao Dias (joao.dias@gaips.inesc-id.pt) INESC-ID and IST, Universidade T´ecnica de Lisboa, Portugal Ruth Aylett (r.s.aylett@hw.ac.uk) Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland... more
The Great Deceivers: Virtual Agents and Believable Lies Jo˜ao Dias (joao.dias@gaips.inesc-id.pt) INESC-ID and IST, Universidade T´ecnica de Lisboa, Portugal Ruth Aylett (r.s.aylett@hw.ac.uk) Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland Henrique Reis and Ana Paiva (henrique.reis@ist.utl.pt, ana.paiva@inesc-id.pt) INESC-ID and IST, Universidade T´ecnica de Lisboa, Portugal Abstract This paper proposes a model giving Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities to artificial agents to allow them to carry out de- ceptive behaviours. It describes a model supporting an N-level Theory of Mind and reports a study to assess whether equip- ping agents with a two-level ToM results in them being per- ceived as more socially intelligent than agents with a single- level ToM. A deception game being developed for intercultural training of children, used for this study, is described. Finally, we report results from this study consistent with the hypothe- sis that a two-level Theory of Mind better supports agent...
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Social robots are being developed as a form of social skills training for individual's with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). Effective training will therefore require the social signals produced by a robot to be contingent with... more
Social robots are being developed as a form of social skills training for individual's with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). Effective training will therefore require the social signals produced by a robot to be contingent with people's knowledge and expectations of social cognition and behaviour. Designing recognisable facial expressions is an important part of this challenge; ensuring interactions are more believable and motivating. This design process requires - amongst other factors - consideration of how culture and native language affects social signal processing. In this experiment participants offered a full-bodied robot (named 'Alyx') food items to which Alyx reacted autonomously, producing either an approving or disapproving expression. Participant's responded to these expressions (i.e. the robots social signals) by indicating whether Alyx liked or disliked the food. Task performance was examined both quantitatively (response time and accuracy) and q...
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There is a growing demand for new forms of intercultural training. We describe a demonstration of an agent-based application designed to teach young adults (18-25) general patterns of behaviour that can distinguish a broad range of... more
There is a growing demand for new forms of intercultural training. We describe a demonstration of an agent-based application designed to teach young adults (18-25) general patterns of behaviour that can distinguish a broad range of cultures. Training is done through an interactive-story telling approach where the user must go through a series of critical incidents, interacting with agents capable of simulating different synthetic cultures in their behaviour.
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Despite the popularity of research on robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), there has been a lack of study of the use of robots in therapy for adults. This paper describes progress towards designing... more
Despite the popularity of research on robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), there has been a lack of study of the use of robots in therapy for adults. This paper describes progress towards designing robot-assisted therapy for adults with ASC that will allow people to rehearse workplace-relevant social skills. We summarize our prior work on designing interpretable facial expressions for our low degree-of-freedom robot face and describe an in-progress human-robot interaction study involving interruption during a realistic workplace scenario. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI ’19, Glasgow...
This paper reports work being carried out in the EMOTE project (http://www.emote-project.eu/) towards the development of an empathic robot tutor at a multi-touch table for geography curriculum teaching for 11-14 year olds.
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This paper briefly describes our proposal for storytelling in virtual environments from a virtual guide perspective. In our model the guide begins at a particular location and starts to navigate the world telling the user stories related... more
This paper briefly describes our proposal for storytelling in virtual environments from a virtual guide perspective. In our model the guide begins at a particular location and starts to navigate the world telling the user stories related to the places she visits. Our guide tries to emulate a real guide’s behaviour in such a situation. In particular, she behaves as a spontaneous real guide who knows stories about the places in the virtual world but has not prepared an exhaustive tour nor a storyline. In addition the paper exposes the concrete scenario where the guide has been successfully tested, as well as the performance obtained by using two guides with different profiles.
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The paper describes work-in-progress in extending a behavioural agent architecture to include a low-level emotional system and communication of emotions between agents using virtual odour for propagation. 1. Background This paper... more
The paper describes work-in-progress in extending a behavioural agent architecture to include a low-level emotional system and communication of emotions between agents using virtual odour for propagation. 1. Background This paper discusses work-in-progress in emotion as a form of interaction between (pseudo-)embodied agents in a virtual environment (VE). It attempts to integrate emotions at the pseudo-physiological level into an existing behavioural architecture. It then seeks mechanisms for the transmission of emotion between agents, and for the perceived emotion of one agent to influence the emotion and thence the behaviour of another. The work discussed here confines itself to the behavioural level, taking sheep as exemplar agents. Emotional interaction between agents clearly requires an internal emotional architecture but this has to be linked both to transmission and reception mechanisms. We do not include intentionality in this system ‐ emotional interaction is being modelled ...
Manually rotatable control or selector knob member adapted to be connected to an operating shaft for an electrical or electronic device, such as a rotary switch, a volume control, etc., said operating shaft having a forward end portion... more
Manually rotatable control or selector knob member adapted to be connected to an operating shaft for an electrical or electronic device, such as a rotary switch, a volume control, etc., said operating shaft having a forward end portion fluted in the longitudinal direction thereof, which has a locking hole formed centrally therein and an annular lining of resilient material provided inside the wall of the locking hole. With this construction, the knob member can be fastly coupled to the operating shaft, while being locked in place at any desired angular position with respect to the forward end portion of the shaft.