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[AI vendor] Symbolically Isolated Linguistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms

2012-02-04T16:08:22+00:00

AI Company delivering Silvia: Symbolically Isolated Linguistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms

[Company] Vastpark

2012-02-01T15:03:54+00:00

Virtual world for Virtual product demos, simulation & training, synthetic environments & visual collaboration

[Papers] Controlling the Behaviour of Animated Presentation Agents in the Interface: Scripting versus Instruc

2012-01-31T16:39:52+00:00

Lifelike characters, or animated agents, provide a promising option for interface development because they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles with which humans are already familiar. In this contribution, we revisit some of our past and ongoing projects to motivate an evolution of character-based presentation systems. This evolution starts from systems in which
a character presents information content in the
style of a TV presenter. It moves on with the introduction of presentation teams that convey information to the user by performing role plays. To explore new forms of active user involvement during a presentation, the next step can lead to systems that convey information in the style of interactive performances. From a technical point of
view, this evaluation is mirrored in different
approaches to determine the behavior of the
employed characters. By means of concrete applications, we argue that a central planning component for automated agent scripting is not always a good choice, especially not in the case of interactive performances where the user might take on an active role as well.

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[Papers] Towards Conversational Human-Computer Interaction

2012-01-31T16:32:57+00:00

The belief that humans will be able to interact with computers in conversational speech has long been a favorite subject
in science fiction. This reflects the persistent belief that spoken dialogue would be the most natural and powerful user
interface to computers. With recent improvements in computer technology and in speech and language processing,
such systems are starting to appear feasible. There are significant technical problems that still need to be solved before speech-driven interfaces become truly conversational. This paper describes the results of a ten-year effort building
robust spoken dialogue systems at the University of Rochester.

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[Papers] Chatbots are natural web interface to information portals

2012-01-31T16:26:38+00:00

In this paper we describe a way to access information using chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. FAQs are Frequently-Asked Questions documents, designed to capture the logical ontology of a given domain. Any Natural Language interface to an FAQ is constrained to reply with the given Answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large) set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In this paper and as an evidence for this argument, the FAQ in the School of Computing (SoC) at the University of Leeds as well as Perl, Linux, and Python were used to retrain the ALICE chat-bot system, producing FAQchat. The replies from FAQchat looks like results generated by WWW search engines such as AskJeeves or Google. User trials with AskJeeves, Google and FAQchat demonstrate that FAQchat is a viable alternative, and in fact many users prefer it to Google as tool to access FAQ databases. The restricted domain of an FAQ is special case of Question Answering which does not require the sophisticated analysis techniques.

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[Papers] Chatbots: are they really useful?

2012-01-31T16:17:44+00:00

Chatbots are computer programs that interact with users using natural languages. This technology started in the 1960’s; the aim was to see if chatbot systems could fool users that they were real humans. However, chatbot systems are not only built to mimic human conversation, and entertain users. In this paper, we investigate other applications where
chatbots could be useful such as education, information retrival, business, and e-commerce. A range of chatbots with useful applications, including several based on the ALICE/AIML architecture, are presented in this paper.

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[Papers] A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus

2012-01-31T16:11:19+00:00

Human machine conversation as a technology integrates different areas where the core is language, and the computational methodologies facilitate communication between users and computers using
natural language. A related term to machine conversation is the chatbot, a conversational
agent that interacts with users turn by turn using natural language. Different chatbots or human-computer dialogue systems have been developed using text communication starting from ELIZA that simulates a psychotherapist, then PARRY which simulates a paranoid patient.

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[Papers] Minds, brains, and programs

2012-01-31T15:59:37+00:00

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore the consequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in human beings(and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain I assume thisis an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for
intentionality.(2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition ofintentionality The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim The form of the argument isto show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have the following consequences (3) The explanation of how the brain producesintentionality cannot be that it doesit by instantiating a computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and 2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be a trivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could notsucceed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human brain. Thisfollowsfrom 2 and 4.
"Could a machine think?" On the argument advanced here only a machine could think, and only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines with internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains And that is why strong AI haslittle to tell us about thinking,since it is not about machines but about programs, and no program by
itselfissufficientforthinking.

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[Papers] How am I? Guidelines for Animated Interface Agents Evaluation

2012-01-31T15:33:26+00:00

The area of animated interface agents is related to the development of applications that aim to improve humancomputer interaction process using software agents
represented by characters or human figures. Although several projects are being developed in this area, there isn’t a method to describe criteria that ought to be considered to evaluate animated interface agents. This
paper proposes basic guidelines for animated agents evaluation based on concepts provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We believe that the proposed guidelines could help both AI
(to project and to develop agents that can enhance humanagent usability) and HCI researchers (to evaluate animated interface agents).

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[Papers] Design and Evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents: A Proposed Taxonomy

2012-01-31T15:27:32+00:00

This workshop call demonstrates that our field is eager to move beyond first-generation generalist projects, toward a more mature
practice. To do so, we seek to set up a common set of expectations and criteria for how to judge our work. In this paper,
we propose some subclasses of embodied conversational character research and design, with criteria for describing and evaluating
research and design advances in each. We suggest that researchers in this field could benefit from carefully identifying their own
areas of expertise and contribution, and then looking for ways to collaborate on standards and share advances within these subareas.
Presenting results, then, would require making clear the sub-areas addressed by the particular project, with evaluations appropriate to those areas included. We believe this approach can help the research community to clarify contributions, and more easily build a common base of knowledge.

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