Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper presents an approach to incorporate emotion regulation as addressed within psychology literature into virtual characters. To this end, first Gross’ informal theory of emotion regulation has been formalised using a dynamical system style modelling approach. Next, a virtual environment has been created, involving a number of virtual agents, which have been equipped with the formalised model for emotion regulation. This environment has been used to successfully generate a number of emergent virtual stories, in which characters regulate their emotions by applying regulation strategies such as situation selection and attentional deployment. The behaviours shown in the stories were found consistent with descriptions of human regulation processes.

Emotion takes an increasingly important place in the design of intelligent virtual agents. Designers of emotional agents build on theories from cognitive psychology, that describe the cognitive functioning of emotions with two indivisible processes [1,2]: the process triggers emotions, in particular intense negative emotions to point out threatening stimuli, and the process modifies the behaviour to manage these stimuli. Nevertheless, among the existing emotional agents, a lot express emotions triggered by an appraisal process [3] but few have a coping process allowing their emotions to impact their behaviour [4,5,6]. In previous work [7] we provided a formalization of Ortony et al.’s appraisal process [8] in a BDI logic, a logic of mental attitudes. The next step is to formalize the coping process in the same framework. Our aim here is to provide the theoretical basis of an agent architecture rather than an implementation. We only give here an overview of our framework (. [9,10] for more details).

Emergent narrative systems create stories which are always different from each other. Creating summaries of these stories is a challenge especially if we want to capture the richness of the characters. Our goal is to automatically generate summaries from emergent narrative using comics as the visual medium for the summary. We identify the most important situations in the story log looking at the emotional state of the characters, transform the resulting summary into a comics description and create the comic. We believe that a good summarization of a story that maintains the emotions of the characters together with an expressive visual representation is essential for the user to remember the story.

In the teamwork research area there is an increasing interest about the principles behind team effectiveness and effective team training; for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) Team Training is an excellent application area; nevertheless, the few reported works about IVAs in team training, illustrate both the use for the individualized teaching (Pedagogical Agents) of procedural tasks and the substitution of missing team members (Teammate Agents) to promote the practice of team tasks in relation to functional roles (Taskwork) [1].

Our interest on Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training (IVETs) has led us to propose a Team Training Strategy (TTS) whose purpose is to promote social skills as well as knowledge and skills related to tasks of socio technical nature. The alternatives that we are evaluated to improve the performance of human groups and to promote effective teams deal with: the use of scaffolding as the best tutoring approach, the promotion of social skills before technical skills, and especially, the selection of the best nonfunctional roles (team roles) balance according to the task.

In addition, our aim is to incorporate into an IVA called Pancho (Pedagogical AgeNt to support Colaborative Human grOups) the particular behaviors of Team Roles defined by Belbin [2]; Pancho, with a selected team role —according to a team model— will join the human group with the intention of improving the performance of the team (Teamwork) and providing scaffolding to the trainees (Taskwork). The Belbin’s categorization is the earliest and still the most popular. He states that the team role can be defined as a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with each others at work in a certain distinctive ways; he also states that in teamwork, a good mix of team roles in the group is necessary for groups to use their technical skills optimally. The team roles defined by Belbin have very particular behaviors; we have selected a generic cognitive architecture for agents with emotionally influenced behaviors —called COGNITIVA— to realize those roles [3]. The constructs provided by this architecture (Personal traits, Concerns, Moods, Attitudes and Physical states) are being properly instantiated to generate the desired behaviors.

The development of virtual agents designed to draw users into personal and professional relationships with them represents a growing area of research [1]. Mobility and context awareness represent important directions of research for these relational agents, since they offer unique affordances for relationship development. A mobile/wearable agent has the potential to be with a user for a significant period of time, and frequency of contact alone has been shown to be associated with increased solidarity between people. The ability to sense some aspects of the user’s environment (context awareness) may also provide mobile agents with unique relational affordances. Automatically recognizing and commenting on situations in the user’s life can amplify many relational perceptions, including familiarity, common ground, solidarity and intimacy. In addition, an agent’s ability to proactively interrupt and help a user in a situation that is automatically sensed by the agent may lead to increased perceptions of trust and caring by the user.

This paper provides a brief overview of an implicit training method used for teaching autonomous agents to represent humans in 3D Virtual Worlds without any explicit training efforts being required.

In this article, we show how approaches based on interactive data-mining may inspire new conceptions of theatre staging. They may be applied thanks to virtual agent systems interacting with comedians. We then give an example of such a theatre production, .

A typical present-day virtual actor is able to store episodes in an manner, which does not allow for reconstructing the actor’s personal stories. We have prototyped a virtual RPG actor with a episodic memory, which allows for this reconstruction. The paper overviews the work done and sketches the work in progress.

We present the platform for IVAs development in the human like environment of the first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament 2004. This environment is extendible and supported by vast community of users. Based on our previous experience the problem of fast verification of models of artificial intelligence or IVAs is in implementation issues. The developer spends most of his time solving technical environment dependent issues and malfunctions, which drives him away from his goals. Therefore our modular platform provides a tool, which helps solving those problems and the developer can spend saved time by solving another AI based issues and model verification. The platform is aimed for research and educational purposes.

In this article we present an ongoing project in our research group, an ECA based multicultural tour guide system. Tour guide ECA agent provides information about the city of Dubrovnik and dynamically changes its behaviors among Japanese, Croatian and general western cultures speaking in English.