National Institute of Technology

Tiruchirappalli

CA 7B3 – Software Agents

Write-Upof

Agents for Learning Intelligence Assistance II

Submitted to - Submitted by – Dr. B. Ramadoss 205114025 Palash Maran

205114026 Prateek Soni

205114027 Jinendra Pratap Singh

205114028 Priyanka Kothari

205114029 Shubham Prajapati

Life-like Computer CharacterIntroduction

Life-like characters are one of the most exciting technologies for human– computer interface applications. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. In social computing, a paradigm that aims to support the tendency of humans to interact with computers as social actors, life-like characters are key. They may embody the interface between humans and computers.

Definition - A Life-like character is a software agent with a virtual face and body on a computer screen and behaves likes a creature or a person.

The success of life-like character applications today relies on the careful crafting of their designers, mostly programmers. The wide dissemination of life-like character technology in interactive systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent life-like behaviour. The core tasks include the synchronization of synthetic speech and gestures, the expression of emotion and personality by means of body movement and facial display, the coordination of the embodied conversational behaviour of multiple characters possibly including the user, and the design of artificial minds for synthetic characters.

General Types –

Based on the applications usage and the environment in which it has to be implemented they are categorised in following way :

Animated : characters that are graphically represented. Robotic : agents that are realized as physical entities to operate in the physical

world.

Towards Social Computing

Since human–human communication is a highly effective and efficient way of interaction, life-like characters are promising candidates to improve human– computer interaction (HCI). Embodied agents may use multiple modalities such as voice, gestures, and facial expression to convey information and regulate communication.

As an HCI paradigm, the goal of character-based human–computer interfaces seems to be diametrically opposed to that of the “disappearing computer” concept in ubiquitous and invisible computing. Those technologies are intended to “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. By contrast, the power of character

based HCI derives from the fact that people know how to interact with other people by using the modalities of their body (voice, gesture, gaze, etc.) and interpret the bodily signals of their interlocutors.

The authors carried out a series of classical psychological tests of human–human social interaction, The results of those experiments suggest that humans treat computers in an essentially natural way – as social actors – with a tendency, for instance, to be nicer in “face-to-face” interactions than in third-party conversations, who investigated the impact of animated agents in educational software along the dimensions of motivation and helpfulness, and coined the term “persona effect”, “which is that the presence of a lifelike character in an interactive learning environment – even one that is not expressive – can have a strong positive effect on students’ perception of their learning experience”

Social computing can be characterized as

• computing that intentionally displays social and affective cues to users and aims to trigger social reactions in users; and

• computing that recognizes affective user states and gives affective feedback to users.

Authoring Life-Like Characters

One of the most challenging tasks in life-like character research is the design of powerful and flexible authoring tools for content experts. Animating the visual appearance of life-like characters and integrating them into an application environment involves a large number of complex and highly inter-related tasks, such as:

• The synchronization of synthetic speech, gaze, and gestures.• The expression of personality and affective state by means of body movement, facial

display, and speech.• The coordination of the bodily behaviour of multiple characters, including the

synchronization of the characters’ conversational behaviour. • The communication between one or more characters and the user.

Platform

• Character Markup Language - (CML) contains both low-level and medium-level tags to define the gesture behaviour of a character.

• Virtual Human Markup Language - (VHML) provides high-level and low-level tagging structures for facial and bodily animation, gesture, speech, emotion, as well as dialogue management.

• Scripting Technology for Embodied Persona - (STEP) language contains high-level control specifications for scripting communicative gestures of 3D animated agents.

APPLICATIONS

• One of the most successful application fields of life-like character technology is computer-based learning environments where life-like character can perform in a variety of student-related roles, especially as tutors and trainers.

• Life-like virtual characters existing in PC computer games.

• Life-like character appear as well on a computer screen in productivity applications. A well-known paperclip Clippy, officially named Clipp it, is an example of an life-like character present in the Microsoft Word application.

• Life-like character and virtual animals populating real world 3D simulations and virtual worlds. These synthetic characters are capable of taking physical actions within virtual reality environments and their bodies are actually submitted to physical constraints.

Fig. Persona Project at Microsoft

The diagram represents the modules and communication paths among the various components of the Persona system. Without the vision component, there is a unidirectional flow of control, from spoken input to graphics, speech, and audio output. At the core of the Dialog module is a state machine which enumerates the character’s possible states and state transitions.

Conclusion

• Social interfaces are already part of consumer multimedia products.• More and more CD-ROM titles have animated characters to provide help, lead the

user through the story, or make regular GUI interactions more friendly.

• These are currently simple, deterministic, 2D animated characters. • The next generation of social interfaces will include lifelike 3D characters that

provide a more intuitive mode of user interaction.

References Life-like Characters by Helmut Prendinger, Mitsuru Ishizuka https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~mturk/Papers/FG96.pdf G. Ball et al., “Lifelike computer characters”, in Jeffrey Bradshaw (ed.), Software

Agents, M.I.T. Press, 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_reasoning_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture Ingrand, F.; M. Georgeff; A Rao (1992). "An architecture for real-time reasoning and

system control". IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications. IEEE Press. 7 (6): 34–44. doi:10.1109/64.180407

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/retsina_agent_arch.html Jeffrey M . Bradshaw , Software Agents , MIT Press, 2000. http :// agents.umbc.edu/introduction/01-Bradshaw.pdf http:// www.researchgate.net/publication/

234783334_Software_agents_for_cooperative_learning