Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We previously proposed a gradual Web rendering system. This system rendered Web content incrementally according to the context of the user and the environment, enabling casual Web browsing. Unfortunately, it had low levels of readability and enjoyment. In this paper, we describe the problems with it and introduce content adaptation mechanisms to solve these problems.

In this paper we describe our efforts to increase the entertainment value of the stories generated by our story generation system, the Virtual Storyteller, at the levels of plot creation, discourse generation and spoken language presentation. We also discuss the construction of a story database that will enable our system to learn from previous stories and user feedback, to create better and more entertaining stories.

This paper presents a library for collaborative virtual environments that will enable developers to extend their standalone 3D applications into the collaborative virtual environment applications without many efforts. The collaborative virtual environment applications usually put many extraordinary consistency problems on developers. Many of these problems are related to distributed systems and parallel processing. Most of them are already taken care in the library presented in this paper. To show usability and make programming with the library even easier, it was integrated as the extension into the Open Inventor. As a result, all Open Inventor applications can now benefit from collaboration with other applications. Many of them require just few lines of changes to their sources to get robust collaboration; compared to hundreds lines of code of hand-made solution that will give just simple collaboration without any consistency guaranties.

Affordable wireless networking enables a wide range of devices to encode spatial data into media both for the outdoor and indoor environment. In this paper, the authors present a platform for generating, transmitting and sharing the location-aware media flow. Interactive applications, such as video search by locations, location search by interesting spots, navigation games and online SpatiuMedia community, are presented.

The world’s first software-only Karaoke Machine released in Japan (2002) has no ASIC for sound synthesis and effects processing, but instead a group of load-sharing DSPs that run a multiprocessor version of the author’s Extended Csound to support a 64-voice orchestra, real-time MPEG decode, live voice tracking with pitch and tempo following and a full range of audio effects. A new version of the software aimed at low-cost low-power silicon now enables similar interactive performance on lightweight mobile platforms with the same professional audio quality and Internet connectivity. This presentation will describe the system, and close with a live demonstration.

In this paper we discuss a framework for simulation software called the movie metaphor. It is applied to the Dutch Driving Simulator for dynamic control of traffic scenarios. This framework resolves software complexity by the use of agent protocols inspired by the way of working on a movie set. It defines clear responsibilities for the agents so that the system is extensible, maintainable and easy to understand. The framework is a software pattern for multiagent systems especially suitable for simulation software and games.

Webcrow is a software system whose aim is to solve crosswords. Problems of like solving crosswords have been informally defined as AI-Complete and are extremely challenging for machines. Webcrow represents the first solver for Italian crosswords and the first system that tackles this language game using the Web as knowledge base. Currently, Webcrow is competitive against an average crossword player. Crosswords that are “easy” for expert humans (i.e. crosswords from the cover pages of ) are solved, in a 15 minutes time limit, with 80% of correct words and over 90% of correct letters. Webcrow well performs on crosswords that are designed for experts and, in general, it outperforms an average undergraduate student on this kind of crosswords.

The project is a sino-german cooperation, aiming at integrating advanced information technologies to create a high-tech information system that helps visitors to access location-sensitive information services during the 2008 Olympic Games in their preferred language, offering a variety of service-adaptive modalities available on the mobile devices. In this paper, we demonstrate one of the COMPASS2008 services, the , to showcase the new interaction concepts between multimodality, multilingual and location-sensitive information search.

DaFEx (Database of Facial Expressions) is a database created with the purpose of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of the facial expressivity of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). DaFEx consists of 1008 short videos containing emotional facial expressions of the 6 Ekman’s emotions plus the neutral expression. The facial expressions were recorded by 8 italian professional actors (4 male and 4 female) in two acting conditions (“utterance” and “no- utterance”) and at 3 intensity levels (high, medium, low). Very much attention has been paid to image quality and framing. The high number of videos, the number of variables considered, and the very good video quality, make of DaFEx a reference corpus both for the evaluation of ECAs and the research in emotion psychology.

PeaceMaker is a computer game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a tool that can be used to teach Israeli and Palestinian teenagers how both sides can work together to achieve peace. The player can choose to take the role of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, react to in-game events, and interact with other political leaders and social groups to establish a stable resolution to the conflict. Derived from gameplay conventions found in commercial strategy games, PeaceMaker aims to prove that computer games can deal with current and serious political issues and that playing for peace and non-violence could be as challenging and satisfying as playing for the opposite goal.