This article builds on insights into how humans cope with emotion to guide the design of virtual humans. Although coping is increasingly viewed in the psychological literature as having a central role in human adaptive behavior, it has been largely ignored in computational models of emotion. In this paper, we show how psychological research on the interplay between human emotion, cognition and coping behavior can serve as a central organizing principle for the behavior of human-like autonomous agents. We present a detailed domain-independent model of coping based on this framework that significantly extends our previous work. We argue that this perspective provides novel insights into realizing adaptive behavior.

The effectiveness of simulation-based training for individual tasks -- such as piloting skills -- is well established, but its use for team training raises challenging technical issues. Ideally, human users could gain valuable leadership experience by interacting with synthetic teammates in realistic and potentially stressful scenarios. However, creating human-like teammates that can support flexible, natural interactions with humans and other synthetic agents requires integrating a wide variety of capabilities, including models of teamwork, models of human negotiation, and the ability to participate in face-to-face spoken conversations in virtual worlds. We have developed such virtual humans by integrating and extending prior work in these areas, and we have applied our virtual humans to an example peacekeeping training scenario to guide and evaluate our research. Our models allow agents to reason about authority and responsibility for individual actions in a team task and, as appropriate, to carry out actions, give and accept orders, monitor task execution, and negotiate options. Negotiation is guided by the agents' dynamic assessment of alternative actions given the current scenario conditions, with the aim of guiding the human user towards an ability to make similar assessments.

This paper describes the virtual humans developed as part of the Mission Rehearsal Exercise project, a virtual reality based training system. This project is an ambitious exercise in integration, both in the sense of integrating technology with entertainment industry content, but also in that we have joined a number of component technologies that have not been integrated before. This integration has not only raised new research issues, but it has also suggested some new approaches to difficult problems. We describe the key capabilities of the virtual humans, including task representation and reasoning, natural language dialogue, and emotion reasoning, and show how these capabilities are integrated to provide more human-level intelligence than would otherwise be possible.

Application

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners.

Click here to download paper in PDF format This article presents a vision of the near future in which computer interaction is characterized by natural face-toface conversations with lifelike characters that speak, emote and gesture. These animated agents will converse with people much like people converse effectively with assistants in a variety of focused applications. Despite the research advances required to realize this vision, and the lack of strong experimental evidence that animated agents improve human computer interaction, we argue that initial prototypes of perceptive animated interfaces can be developed today, and that the resulting systems will provide more effective and engaging communication experiences than existing systems. In support of this hypothesis, we first describe initial experiments using an animated character to teach speech and language skills to children with hearing problems, and classroom subject and social skills to children with autistic spectrum disorder. We then show how existing dialogue system architectures can be transformed into perceptive animated interfaces by integrating computer vision and animation capabilities. We conclude by describing the Colorado Literacy Tutor, a computer-based literacy program that provides an ideal test bed for research and development of perceptive animated interfaces, and consider next steps required to realize the vision.

In this paper, we discuss scripting tools that aim at facilitating the design of web-based interactions with animated characters capable of affective communication. Specifically, two systems are developed. The SCREAM system is a scripting tool that enables authors to create emotionally and socially appropriate responses of animated characters.

Abstract: One of the promises of ITSs and ILEs is that they will teach and assist learning in an intelligent manner. Historically this has tended to mean concentrating on the interface, on the representation of the domain and on the representation of the student’s knowledge. So systems have attempted to provide students with reifications both of what is to be learned and of the learning process, as well as optimally sequencing and adjusting activities, problems and feedback to best help them learn that domain. We now have embodied (and disembodied) teaching agents and computer-based peers, and the field demonstrates a much greater interest in metacognition and in collaborative activities and tools to support that collaboration. Nevertheless the issue of the teaching competence of ITSs and ILEs is still important, as well as the more specific question as to whether systems can and should mimic human teachers. Indeed increasing interest in embodied agents has thrown the spotlight back on how such agents should behave with respect to learners. In the mid 1980s Ohlsson and others offered critiques of ITSs and ILEs in terms of the limited range and adaptability of their teaching actions as compared to the wealth of tactics and strategies employed by human expert teachers. So are we in any better position in modelling

This paper summarizes some of the progress that has been made toward populating such a world with embodied conversational agents

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