The 2nd seminar on Horizons for Information Societies was about affective interface agents. Dr Richard (, ) and Dr Prendinger () presented their research on, respectively, emotional agents for time management and interaction based on physiological signals at the .
See also: previous seminar (#1), next seminar (#3).
Slides of the presentations:
Date: 5 December 2006 (15:00-17:00)
Location: , Tokyo, Japan
Language: English
Registration fees: None
Organization: Dr ()
Abstract: Researchers in affective computing study the role of emotions in Human-Computer Interaction, in order to propose simpler and more natural ways to interact with machines. This talk will focus on the use of simulated emotions for interface agents. In particular, I will present our project of an adaptive, emotional, and expressive assistant for personal time management, in charge of reminding a user what he/she has to do.
Speaker: Dr Richard achieved her Ph.D. entitled Describing behaviours of autonomous virtual agents in 2001, followed by a post-doc in the field of robotics applied to Ambient Intelligence at (Paris, France). Since September 2005, she is a , working at with Professor Seiji Yamada.
Download
Abstract: Embodied interfaces are computer interfaces that emulate aspects of human face-to-face communication by using anthropomorphic virtual character agents. Those character agents do not only display multi-modal behavior in the form of speech, facial expressions, and gestures, but they may also perceive, and to a limited extent, understand the user. A salient feature of embodied interfaces is that they support affective communication with users, by expressing emotion verbally and non-verbally, and also recognizing the emotional state of the user. In the talk, I will present my work on affective interaction with life-like interface agents. Specifically, information about the user's emotion derived from bio-signals allows one to build computers that display empathy, interfaces that respond to and seemingly care about the user's feelings. Besides the use of physiological signals as an input modality, I will also demonstrate that physiological user information, in particular skin conductance, electromyography, and eye movements, can be applied as a novel type of evaluation method of the utility of character agents as emotional and attention-directing interaction partners of users.
Website: <http://research.nii.ac.jp/~prendinger/>
Download