IVA

Embodied human communication encompasses both verbal (speech) and non-verbal information (e.g., gesture and head movements). Recent advances in machine learning have substantially improved the technologies for generating synthetic versions of both of ...

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally ...

Conversational Agents (CAs) present many opportunities for changing how we interact with information and computer systems in a more natural, accessible way. Building on research in machine learning and HCI, it is now possible to design and test multi-...

In this paper, we address the problem of how an interactive agent (such as a robot) can present information to an audience and adapt the presentation according to the feedback it receives. We extend a previous behaviour tree-based model to generate the ...

Alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug use cause significant loss quality of life, and represent a large economic burden on society. Standardized questionnaires have been developed to enable healthcare providers to screen individuals for substance misuse ...

We present in this paper a method for generating in real time a great variability of multimodal backchannel feedbacks, increasing the naturalness of IVAs. The originality of the approach lies in its capacity to generate all types of features into a ...

Human interlocutors automatically adapt verbal and non-verbal signals so that different behaviors become synchronized over time. Multimodal communication comes naturally to humans, while this is not the case for Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). ...

With forty-six Action Units (AUs) forming the building blocks in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), millions of facial configurations can be formed. Most research has focused on a subset of combinations to determine the link between facial ...

Facial expressions (FEs) communicate a rich variety of social, grammatical, and affective signals. However, the most generally accepted set of recognizable FEs remains limited to seven basic displays of emotion: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, ...

Modeling the interactions between users and social groups of virtual agents (VAs) is vital in many virtual-reality-based applications. However, only little research on group encounters has been conducted yet. We intend to close this gap by focusing on ...

Sketch-based interfaces in 2D screen space allow to efficiently author the flow of virtual crowds in a direct and interactive manner. Here, options to redirect a flow by sketching barriers, or guiding entities based on a sketched network of connected ...

Virtual-reality-based interactions with virtual agents (VAs) are likely subject to similar influences as human-human interactions. In either real or virtual social interactions, interactants try to maintain their personal space (PS), an ubiquitous, ...

Most socially interactive virtual agents that generate facial expressions lack critical visual features such as expressive wrinkles, which could reduce their realistic appearance. Here, we examined the impact of dynamic facial texture on perceptions of ...

Facial expressions are used to facilitate daily interactions including conversations, in every culture. However, little is known about which specific facial expressions convey conversational messages, which limits the social signalling capabilities of ...

Is it helpful for a medical physical health chatbot to show empathy? How can a chatbot show empathy only based on short-term text conversations? We have investigated these questions by building two different medical assistant chatbots with the goal of ...

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are suffering from a lack of adoption from users. This paper emphasizes virtual intimacy as a lever to support social dimension of human-agent interaction and enhance user experience. Here, we present an autonomous ...

Generating natural embodied conversational agents within virtual spaces crucially depends on speech sounds and their directionality. In this work, we simulated directional filters to not only add directionality, but also directionally adapt each ...

To build agents that can engage users in more open-ended social contexts, research has increasingly been focused on data-driven approaches to reduce the requirement of extensive, hand-authored behavioral content creation. However, one fundamental ...

Gesture behavior is a natural part of human conversation. Much work has focused on removing the need for tedious hand-animation to create embodied conversational agents by designing speech-driven gesture generators. However, these generators often work ...

During interactions with others, people have expectancies concerning their communication partners' behaviors. Negative violations of these expectancies are known to exert an adverse impact on people's perceptions and attitudes. Likewise, with regard to ...

In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 80 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practises in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social ...

Intelligent virtual agents have been developed to study, assess and teach a variety of human interpersonal skills. Here we examine the impact of an agent's perspective-taking sophistication on human negotiators. Good perspective-takers can discover ...

In this work we test the hypothesis that interacting with an intelligent virtual character in Virtual Reality (VR) has a stronger impact compared to the same interaction in a traditional non-immersive platform, both in terms of presence and ...

We present and evaluate a deployed conversational AI system that acts as a host of a working public building on a university campus. The system combines open-domain social chat with task-based conversation regarding navigation in the building, live ...

Rapidly creating educational content that is effective, engaging, and low-cost is a challenge. We present Canvas, a tool for educators that addresses this challenge by enabling the generation of educational video, led by an intelligent virtual agent, ...

Virtual agents with social characteristics such as warmth and competence, which are perceived readily from the face, impact human behavior effectively. However, generating such social signals is challenging because faces are complex, high-dimensional ...

In order to achieve more believable interactions with artificial agents, there is a need to produce dialogue that is not only relevant, but also emotionally appropriate and consistent. This paper presents a comprehensive system that models the emotional ...

For smooth conversation, participants must carefully monitor the turn-management (a.k.a. speaking and listening) willingness of other conversational partners and adjust turn-changing behaviors accordingly. Many studies have focused on predicting the ...

To realize natural-looking virtual agents, one key technical challenge is to automatically generate nonverbal behaviors from spoken language. Since nonverbal behavior varies depending on personality, it is important to generate these nonverbal behaviors ...

Conducting user studies is a crucial component in many scientific fields. While some studies require participants to be physically present, other studies can be conducted both physically (e.g. in-lab) and online (e.g. via crowdsourcing). Inviting ...