Papers

This paper illustrates a storytelling-based application for an anthropomorphic guide to a historical site, presented through a mobile device. We discuss the requirements posed by the communication context and the idea of approaching the problem through storytelling. Then we describe the application that merges the basic structure of storytelling with the requirements coming from the communication of the specific knowledge about the historical site, the user interaction issues concerning the target audience and the technological... Read more

This paper aims to describe a pilot at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources. The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using artificial intelligence mark-up language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program-O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content... Read more

Game environments tend to be highly responsive and demanding and thus provoke active learner involvement. Surprisingly, gaming and in the same line also serious gaming, still make little use of one of people’s most common type of interactions i.e. natural language. Despite the presumed positive effect in e-learning of interactive online characters, the use of virtual characters or so-called Non Player Characters still seems in its infancy. In this work, therefore, we started to look... Read more

Spontaneous conversational speech has many characteristics that are currently not modelled well by HMM-based speech synthesis and in order to build synthetic voices that can give an impression of someone partaking in a conversation, we need to utilise data that exhibits more of the speech phenomena associated with conversations than the more generally used carefully read aloud sentences. In this paper we show that synthetic voices built with HMM-based speech synthesis techniques from conversational speech... Read more

This demonstration highlights some emerging capabilities for incremental speech understanding and processing in virtual human dialogue systems. This work is part of an ongoing effort that aims to enable realistic spoken dialogue with virtual humans in multi-party negotiation scenarios. These scenarios are designed to allow trainees to practice their negotiation skills by engaging in face-to-face spoken negotiation with one or more virtual humans. Read more

The current practice in virtual human dialogue systems is to use professional human recordings or limited-domain speech synthesis. Both approaches lead to good performance but at a high cost. To determine the best trade-off between performance and cost, we perform a systematic evaluation of human and synthesized voices with regard to naturalness, conversational aspect, and likability. We also vary the type (in-domain vs. out-of-domain), length, and content of utterances, and take into account the age... Read more

Can chatterbots be useful? This work consists in developing or adapting chatterbot software to be used and enhanced by FATEC’s Sao Paulo students. The main target of it is to introduce its technology and the principal concepts of the AIML style, showing how to use it and analyzing about your real utility. The focus is to use a program in multi-user web applications, so the choice is to use the PHP language with MySQL Database. There... Read more

It is desirable to address accessibility issues within virtual worlds. Moreover, curbing criminal activities within virtual worlds is a major concern to the law enforcement agencies. Forensic investigators and accessibility researchers are gaining considerable interests in detecting and tracking avatars as well as describing their appearance within virtual worlds. Leinhart and Maydt have introduced a novel-set of Haar like features by extending the Viola Jones approach towards rapid object detection. We test this Haar... Read more

Criminal activity in virtual worlds is becoming a major problem for law enforcement agencies. Forensic investigators are becoming interested in being able to accurately and automatically track people in virtual communities. In this paper a set of algorithms capable of verification and recognition of avatar faces with high degree of accuracy are described. Results of experiments aimed at within-virtual-world avatar authentication and inter-reality-based scenarios of tracking aperson between real and virtual worlds are reported. In... Read more

This paper attempts to formalize and to address the ‘leakproofing’ of the Singularity problem presented by David Chalmers. The paper begins with the definition of the Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem. After analysis of existing solutions and their shortcomings, a protocol is proposed aimed at making a more secure confinement environment which might delay potential negative effect from the technological singularity while allowing humanity to benefit from the superintelligence. Read more