Emotion and Adaptation

From the Publisher:
Cynthia Breazeal here presents her vision of the sociable robot of the future, a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated tool. A sociable robot will be able to understand us, to communicate and interact with us, to learn from us and grow with us. It will be socially intelligent in a humanlike way. Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as collaborators and companions. Because the most successful sociable robots will share our social characteristics, the effort to make sociable robots is also a means for exploring human social intelligence and even what it means to be human.
Breazeal defines the key components of social intelligence for these machines and offers a framework and set of design issues for their realization. Much of the book focuses on a nascent sociable robot she designed named Kismet. Breazeal offers a concrete implementation for Kismet, incorporating insights from the scientific study of animals and people, as well as from artistic disciplines such as classical animation. This blending of science, engineering, and art creates a lifelike quality that encourages people to treat Kismet as a social creature rather than just a machine. The book includes a CD-ROM that shows Kismet in action.

Designing Sociable Robots

Mathematica--A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer.

This paper focuses on the role of emotion and expressive behavior in regulating social interaction between humans and expressive anthropomorphic robots, either in communicative or teaching scenarios. We present the scientific basis underlying our humanoid robot's emotion models and expressive behavior, and then show how these scientific viewpoints have been adapted to the current implementation. Our robot is also able to recognize affective intent through tone of voice, the implementation of which is inspired by the scientific findings of the developmental psycholinguistics community. We first evaluate the robot's expressive displays in isolation. Next, we evaluate the robot's overall emotive behavior (i.e. the coordination of the affective recognition system, the emotion and motivation systems, and the expression system) as it socially engages nave human subjects face-to-face.

/pdf/emotion-and-sociable-humanoid-robots-2inax9grw9.pdf

Emotion and sociable humanoid robots

Recent years have witnessed the birth of a new paradigm for learning environments: animated pedagogical agents. These lifelike autonomous characters cohabit learning environments with students to create rich, face-to-face learning interactions. This opens up exciting new possibilities; for example, agents can demonstrate complex tasks, employ locomotion and gesture to focus students' attention on the most salient aspect of the task at hand, and convey emotional responses to the tutorial situation. Animated pedagogical agents offer great promise for broadening the bandwidth of tutorial communication and increasing learning environments' ability to engage and motivate students. This article sets forth the motivations behind animated pedagogical agents, describes the key capabilities they offer, and discusses the technical issues they raise. The discussion is illustrated with descriptions of a number of animated agents that represent the current state of the art.

Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments

This paper describes Steve , an animated agent that helps students learn to perform physical , procedural tasks . The student and Steve cohabit a three - dimensional , simulated mock - up of the student's work environment . Steve can demonstrate how to perform tasks and can also monitor students while they practice tasks , providing assistance when needed . This paper describes Steve's architecture in detail , including perception , cognition , and motor control . The perception module monitors the state of the virtual world , maintains a coherent representation of it , and provides this information to the cognition and motor control modules . The cognition module interprets its perceptual input , chooses appropriate goals , constructs and executes plans to achieve those goals , and sends out motor commands . The motor control module implements these motor commands , controlling Steve's voice , locomotion , gaze , and gestures , allowing Steve to manipulate objects in the virtual world .

Animated agents for procedural training in virtual reality: Perception, cognition, and motor control

Discusses some of the key issues that must be addressed in creating virtual humans, or androids. As a first step, we overview the issues and available tools in three key areas of virtual human research: face-to-face conversation, emotions and personality, and human figure animation. Assembling a virtual human is still a daunting task, but the building blocks are getting bigger and better every day.

/pdf/creating-interactive-virtual-humans-some-assembly-required-gaujovy88t.pdf

Creating interactive virtual humans: some assembly required

Immersive virtual worlds are increasingly being used for education, training, and entertainment, and virtual humans that can interact with human users in these worlds play many important roles. However, current computational models of dialogue do not address the issues that arise with face-to-face communication situated in three-dimensional worlds, such as the proximity and attentional focus of others, the ability to maintain multi-party conversations, and the interplay between speech and nonverbal signals. This paper presents a new model that integrates and extends prior work on spoken dialogue and embodied conversational agents, and describes an initial implementation that has been applied to training in virtual reality.

https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Embodied%20Agents%20for%20Multi-party%20Dialogue%20in%20Immersive%20%20Virtual%20Worlds.pdf

Embodied agents for multi-party dialogue in immersive virtual worlds

We describe an initial prototype of a holodeck- like environment that we have created for the Mission Rehearsal Exercise Project. The goal of the project is to create an experience learning system where the participants are immersed in an environment where they can encounter the sights, sounds, and circumstances of real-world scenarios. Virtual humans act as characters and coaches in an interactive story with pedagogical goals.

https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Toward%20the%20Holodeck-%20Integrating%20Graphics,%20Sound,%20Character%20and%20Story.pdf

Jeff Rickel

Papers

Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments

Animated agents for procedural training in virtual reality: Perception, cognition, and motor control

Creating interactive virtual humans: some assembly required

Embodied agents for multi-party dialogue in immersive virtual worlds

Toward the holodeck: integrating graphics, sound, character and story