This paper describes an agent-based approach to realizing interactive pedagogical drama. Characters choose their actions autonomously, while director and cinematographer agents manage the action and its presentation in order to maintain story structure, achieve pedagogical goals, and present the dynamic story to as to achieve the best dramatic effect. Artistic standards must be maintained while permitting substantial variability in story scenario. To achieve these objectives, scripted dialog is deconstructed into elements that are portrayed by agents with emotion models. Learners influence how the drama unfolds by controlling the intentions of one or more characters, who then behave in accordance with those intentions. Interactions between characters create opportunities to move the story in pedagogically useful directions, which the automated director exploits. This approach is realized in the multimedia title Carmen's Bright IDEAS, an interactive health intervention designed to impro...

We present a model of dialogue for embodied virtual agents that can communicate with multiple (human and virtual) agents in a multi-modal setting, including face-to-face spoken and nonverbal, as well as radio interaction, spanning multiple conversations in support of an extended complex task.

We are working toward animated agents that can collaborate with human students in virtual worlds. The agent's objective is to help students learn to perform physical, procedural tasks, such as operating and maintaining equipment. Like most of the previous research on task-oriented dialogues, the agent (computer) serves as an expert that can provide guidance to a human novice. Research on such dialogues dates back more than twenty years (Deutsch 1974), and the subject remains an active research area (Allen et al. 1996; Lochbaum 1994; Walker 1996). However, most of that research has focused solely on verbal dialogues, even though the earliest studies clearly showed the ubiquity of nonverbal communication in human task-oriented dialogues (Deutsch 1974). To allow a wider variety of interactions among agents and human students, we use virtual reality (Durlach and Mavor 1995); agents and students cohabit a threedimensional, interactive, simulated mock-up of the student'

Face Transfer is a method for mapping videorecorded performances of one individual to facial animations of another. It extracts visemes (speech-related mouth articulations), expressions, and three-dimensional (3D) pose from monocular video or film footage. These parameters are then used to generate and drive a detailed 3D textured face mesh for a target identity, which can be seamlessly rendered back into target footage. The underlying face model automatically adjusts for how the target performs facial expressions and visemes. The performance data can be easily edited to change the visemes, expressions, pose, or even the identity of the target—the attributes are separably controllable. This supports

This article presents the tutoring systems that we have been developing. AUTOTUTOR is a conversational agent, with a talking head, that helps college students learn about computer literacy. ANDES, ATLAS, AND WHY2 help adults learn about physics. Instead of being mere information-delivery systems, our systems help students actively construct knowledge through conversations

this article, we describe the key areas in which we are extending Steve. Although there has been extensive prior research in each of these areas, we cannot simply plug in different modules representing the state of the art from the different research communities. Researchers develJULY /AUGUST 2002 computer.org/intelligent 33 Figure 1. Steve, an interactive agent that functions as a collaborative instructor or teammate in a virtual world, describes a power light

This paper reports on a study of human subjects with a robot designed to mimic human conversational gaze behavior in collaborative conversation. The robot and the human subject together performed a demonstration of an invention created at our laboratory; the demonstration lasted 3 to 3.5 minutes. We briefly discuss the robot architecture and then focus the paper on a study of the effects of the robot operating in two different conditions. We offer some conclusions based on the study about the importance of engagement for 3D IUIs. We will present video clips of the subject interactions with the robot at the conference.

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 realworld scenarios. Virtual humans act as characters and coaches in an interactive story with pedagogical goals.

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This paper promotes social role awareness as a desirable capability of animated agents, that are by now strong affective reasoners, but otherwise often lack the social competence observed with humans. In particular, humans may easily adjust their behavior depending on their respective role in a socio-organizational setting, whereas their synthetic pendants tend to be driven mostly by attitudes, emotions, and personality. Our main contribution is the incorporation of `social filter programs' to mental models of animated agents. Those programs may qualify an agent's expression of its emotional state by the social context, thereby enhancing the agent's believability as a conversational partner or virtual teammate. Our implemented system is entirely webbased and demonstrates socially aware animated agents in an environment similar to Hayes-Roth's Cybercaf'e. Keywords believability, social agents, human-like qualities of synthetic agents, social dimension in communication, affective reaso...