G. H. Hardy (1941) argues that the sole criterion for excellent research is that the researcher produces “beauty. ” While seemingly ineffable and frustratingly imprecise, Hardy instead suggests that creating beauty is straightforward. First, the work must be accurate: erroneous results are useless. Second, one’s peers must recognize the work to be interesting, exciting, elegant, and “cool. ” While this second criterion might seem arbitrary, there is generally good agreement between scholars in a given community about “interesting ” work (see Cole and Cole 1973 for a discussion), so one need not survey numerous researchers to ensure research is beautiful; asking a couple is equivalent to asking them all. With certain caveats, the work in embodied conversational agents (ECA) can make claims to beauty. ECAs are phenomenologically “accurate ” to the extent that the agent’s outward appearance objectively matches the appearance, language, attitudes and behavior of humans. Thus, questions that address manifestation accuracy include “Does the agent walk like a person walk? ” and “Does the agent use language and make grammatical errors the same way a person does?”

Would people exhibit similarity-attraction and consistency-attraction toward unambiguously computergenerated speech even when personality is clearly not relevant? In Experiment 1, participants (extrovert or introvert) heard a synthesized voice (extrovert or introvert) on a book-buying Web site. Participants accurately recognized personality cues in text to speech and showed similarity-attraction in their evaluation of the computer voice, the book reviews, and the reviewer. Experiment 2, in a Web auction context, added personality of the text to the previous design. The results replicated Experiment 1 and demonstrated consistency (voice and text personality)-attraction. To maximize liking and trust, designers should set parameters, for example, words per minute or frequency range, that create a personality that is consistent with the user and the content being presented. The vast majority of content on computers and on the World Wide Web is textual. E-mail, documents, spreadsheets, presentation outlines, e-commerce sites, news and information sites, bulletin boards and chat rooms, advertisements, and search engines, although enhanced by graphical content, are all dominated by text. The prevalence of textual material is both a problem and an

We approach creating an interactive drama from the viewpoint that having a human author involved in the creation of the drama is a valuable component. Given that there is this author, we suddenly find opposing forces inherent to the system: the amount of interaction we desire to give the User of the system vs. the amount of dramatic control we wish to give the Writer. In this paper, we propose IDA, an Interactive Drama architecture, which is based on the principle of having a real-time Director agent intelligently guiding the User's experience towards the Writer's dramatic goals, while at the same time allowing as much User flexibility as possible.

We describe an approach to user interface design based on ideas from social science, narratology (the theory of stories), cognitive science, and a new area called algebraic semiotics. Social analysis helps to identify certain roles for users with their associated requirements, and suggests ways to make proofs more understandable, while algebraic semiotics, which combines semiotics with algebraic specification, provides rigorous theories for interface functionality and for a certain technical notion of quality. We apply these techniques to designing user interfaces for a distributed cooperative theorem proving system, whose main component is a website generation and proof assistance tool called Kumo. This interface integrates formal proving, proof browsing, animation, informal explanation, and online background tutorials, drawing on a richer than usual notion of proof. Experience with using the interface is reported, and some conclusions are drawn.

: We describe a new approach to interface design called algebraic semiotics, combining semiotics with algebraic specification to give a rigorous theory of representation quality, and we apply it to the tatami distributed cooperative proving project. This project uses standard html, Java, etc. for remote proof browsing, servers for remote proof execution, a protocol to maintain truth of distributed cooperative proofs, and a tool combining proof assistance with website editing. Its proof paradigm reduces theorems to problems solvable by proof servers. ProofWebs integrate browsing, execution, animation, and informal explanation with formal proofs, and their design has been driven by semiotic ideas. 1 Introduction The landscape of theorem proving can be seen as two main peaks with a great plane between. These peaks represent fully automatic theorem provers and proof checking theorem provers; the plane represents the difficulty of combining their virtues. The peaks are steep and dark bec...

ii.. to my loving kitty and our infant daughter Acknowledgments The work presented here is the culmination of nearly a seven year journey from start to finish; far longer than I would have guessed when arriving in Michigan in the summer of 1999. I would like to thank my advisor, Professor John E. Laird, who has proven to be an excellent mentor and guide during my time as a graduate student. Without him, my writing would be much more obfuscated, my reasoning would be more poorly constructed, and I definitely would not have been as able to pursue such a non-traditional research topic. Prof. Laird gave me the perfect opportunity to apply my academic interests in creativity, improvisation, and artificial intelligence in an exciting new way, which I am wholly grateful for. I would like to thank Professor Edmund H. Durfee, as well as the rest of my committee, for pushing me to improve my work and to think about this research in a more critical light. Thanks to the Institute for Creative Technologies for funding the

: This paper describes some tools to support formal methods, and conversely some formal methods for developing such tools. We focus on distributed cooperative proving over the web. Our tools include a proof editor /assistant, servers for remote proof execution, a distributed truth protocol, an editor generator, and a new method for interface design called algebraic semiotics, which combines semiotics with algebraic specification. Some examples are given. 1. Introduction Formal methods have been used to prove correctness of software, but this task is known to be difficult, for various reasons [5, 13]. New technologies -- the internet, the web, multimedia, applets, etc. -- offer exciting opportunities to reduce this difficulty that have not yet been much explored. We seek to build industrial strength formal method tools for distributed work by ordinary software engineers over the web, especially for concurrent systems. This involves several challenging subtasks, including a practical ...

Introduction On October 27 th 1992 the computerized command-and-control system operated by the London Ambulance Service (LAS) broke down. As a result of this failure, patients had to wait many hours for an ambulance. The outcomes of the LAS project involving the computerization of control-room operations are radically different from the successful introduction of a similar computer despath system at the Greater Manchester Ambulance Service (GMAS). The contrasting outcomes can be attributed to management failures and a technology-driven approach at the London Ambulance Service, as opposed to a user-involved design approach with strong commitment from the management in Manchester (Wastell and Cooper, 1996). What is apparent from the Inquiry Team's investigation of the London Ambulance Service disaster is that neither the Computer Aided Despatch (CAD) system itself, nor its users, were ready for full implementation on 26 October 1992 (Finkelstein, 1995). The sy

– programming of social agents by children

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