Intelligent Virtual Agents

This project proposes that language evolve through reinforcement learning where agents communicate with each other and provide rewards if communication is successful. The fundamental difference between the learning mechanisms that humans use to communicate with one another and how machines learn to communicate is that the system used by humans presupposes that the adult already knows the meanings associated with the human language. Languages evolve historically to be optimal communication systems where human language learning mechanisms have evolved in order to learn these systems more efficiently. Machines in their learning of natural language, have to start at a place that humans mastered thousands of years ago. Uttering previously unheard signals and collectively establishing meaning. The question that this paper deals with is how can a communication system evolve if none of the conspirators have mastered the system previously using evolutionary computation and reinforcement lear...

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation ...

In this paper, we propose a new integration approach to simulate an Autonomous Virtual Agent's cognitive learning of a task for interactive Virtual Environment applications. Our research focuses on the behavioural animation of virtual humans capable of acting independently. Our contribution is important because we present a solution for fast learning with evolution. We propose the concept of a Learning Unit Architecture that functions as a control unit of the Autonomous Virtual Agent's brain. Although our technique has proved to be effective in our case study, there is no guarantee that it will work for every imaginable Autonomous Virtual Agent and Virtual Environment. The results are illustrated in a domain that requires effective coordination of behaviours, such as driving a car inside a virtual city. 1. The design of a learning control structure, 2. The internal storage of the learning information and 3. The efficient evaluation and calculation of feedbacks and reactions from the environment.

In social psychology, emotional contagion describes the widely observed phenomenon of one person's emotions being influenced by surrounding people's emotions. While the overall effect is agreed upon, the underlying mechanism of the spread of emotions has seen little quantification and application to computational agents despite extensive evidence of its impacts in everyday life. In this paper, we examine computational models of emotional contagion by implementing two models ([2] and [8]) that draw from two separate lines of contagion research: thermodynamics-based and epidemiological-based. We first perform sensitivity tests on each model in an evacuation simulation, ESCAPES, showing both models to be reasonably robust to parameter variations with certain exceptions. We then compare their ability to reproduce a real crowd panic scene in simulation, showing that the thermodynamics-style model ([2]) produces superior results due to the ill-suited contagion mechanism at the core of epidemiological models. We also identify that a graduated effect of fear and proximity-based contagion effects are key to producing the superior results. We then reproduce the methodology on a second video, showing that the same results hold, implying generality of the conclusions reached in the first scene.

This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific heritage objectives?

Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emotional expression
processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant
has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual
environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30
years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational
agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze
behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five
personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested
that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a
partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking).
Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas
higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face
conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional
interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and
important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.

La coherencia y el realismo son cualidades que todo desarrollador de agentes inteligentes busca, estas cualidades no podrán ser alcanzadas sin la incorporación de emociones en los mecanismos de comportamiento de los agentes. A simple vista pareciera que las investigaciones siguen caminos erráticos, por lo que se hace pertinente determinar el estado actual de las investigaciones en el área de la incorporación y desarrollo autónomo de emociones en agentes inteligentes, para luego evaluar con propiedad si se están persiguiendo los objetivos correctamente.

We present a fully procedural alternative to branching dialogue that is influenced by theories from linguistic pragmatics and technical work in the field of dialogue systems. Specifically, this is a dialogue manager that extends the Talk of the Town framework, in which non-player characters (NPCs) develop and propagate subjective knowledge of the gameworld. While previously knowledge exchange in this framework could only be expressed symbolically, such exchanges may now be rendered as naturalistic conversations between characters. The larger conversation engine currently lacks a player interface, so in this paper we demonstrate our dialogue manager through conversations between NPCs. From an evaluation task, we find that our system produces conversations that flow far more naturally than randomly assembled ones. As a design objective, we have endeavored to make this dialogue manager lightweight and agnostic to its particular application in Talk of the Town; it is our hope that interested readers will consider porting its straightforward design to their own game engines.

Perception and attention mechanisms are of great importance for entities situated within complex dynamic environments. With roles extending greatly beyond passive information services about the external environment, such mechanisms actively prioritise, augment and expedite information to ensure that the potentially relevant is made available so appropriate action can take place. Here, we describe the rationale behind endowing artificial entities, or virtual agents, with real-time perception and attention systems. We cover the fundamentals of designing and building such systems. Once equipped, the resulting agents can achieve a more substantial connection with their environment for the purposes of reacting, planning, decision making and, ultimately, behaving.

Resumo: Nos últimos anos o surgimento e expansão de inovações tecnológicas, como os chatbots, tem ocasionado a formação de novas áreas de desempenho e/ ou novos perfis profissionais. Nesse sentido a presente pesquisa teve o objetivo de analisar o fenômeno da curadoria de chatbots, para o qual foram realizadas 10 entrevistas semiestruturadas a profissionais experientes no desenvolvimento e na curadoria de chatbots. Os resultados foram organizados em três apartados: 1) a conceptualização da curadoria de chatbots, 2) estratégias utilizadas na curadoria e 3) indicadores de desempenho. Por último, as conclusões finais sintetiza os principais achados do estudo, discute-se sobre a relevância da curadoria de chatbots e compartilha possíveis linhas de pesquisa. Palavras-chave: curadoria de chatbots; teste de chatbots; agentes conversacionais Chatbots curation: conceptualization, strategies and performance indicators Abstract: In recent years, the emergence and expansion of technological innovations, such as chatbots, has led to the formation of new work areas of jobs and / or new professional profiles. In this sense, the present research aimed to analyze the phenomenon of chatbots curation, for which 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted with professionals experienced in the development and chatbots curatorship. The results were organized in three sections: 1) the conceptualization of chatbots curation, 2) strategies used and 3) performance indicators. Finally, the main conclusions of the study are summarize, it is discuss the relevance of chatbots improvement and possible lines of research. 1. Introdução A recente popularização dos chatbots, ao igual que outros tipos de agentes conversacionais, têm causado no mercado de trabalho o surgimento de novos cargos e/ou de novas tarefas relacionadas com o desenvolvimento dessas soluções tecnológicas. O que começou com tímidas aproximações de profissionais de diferentes disciplinas como o design,

Implement a table-lookup agent for the special case of the vacuum-cleaner world consisting of a 2 2 grid of open squares, in which at most two squares will contain dirt. The agent starts in the upper left corner, facing to the right. Recall that a table-lookup agent consists of a table of actions indexed by a percept sequence. In this environment, the agent can always complete its task in nine or fewer actions (four moves, three turns, and two suck-ups), so the table only needs entries for percept sequences up to length nine.

Work on levels of detail for human simulation has occurred mainly on a geometrical level, either by reducing the numbers of polygons representing a virtual human, or replacing them with a two-dimensional imposter. Approaches that reduce the complexity of motions generated have also been proposed. In this paper, we describe ongoing development of a framework for Adaptive Level Of Detail for Human Animation (ALOHA), which incorporates levels of detail for not only geometry and motion, but also includes a complexity gradient for natural behaviour, both conversational and social.

"Gracias a los últimos avances de la tecnología, se ha podido abrir el camino a la investigación sobre interfaces sociales y el uso de los llamados agentes virtuales inteligentes. Estos agentes se hacen visibles en la interfaz como actores animados que representan seres humanos.
Estos agentes tienen la finalidad de interactuar con un usuario, para lograr realizar tareas de una forma natural, para esto, el agente debe ser creíble. No es suficiente que un personaje virtual luzca real en apariencia para lograr una credibilidad por parte del usuario.
El personaje debe además comportarse y comunicarse como lo haría el ser vivo que simula.
Los agentes virtuales se comunican de forma similar a como lo hacen los seres humanos, a través de expresiones verbales y no verbales. El interés de este trabajo es el de lograr que el personaje pueda expresarse de forma no verbal de una manera que sea coherente al contexto. La dificultad inherente a esta tarea se da por el hecho de que el ser humano puede
experimentar una gran variedad de emociones, las cuales son representadas por un amplio rango de expresiones, que también están determinadas por la personalidad del sujeto y del contexto. Las expresiones no verbales llevan el mayor peso de la comunicación de emociones y sirven de apoyo en la transmisión de los sentimientos e intenciones. El uso de agentes se ha extendido a una diversidad de áreas, como la terapia, el entretenimiento, la educación y tutoría.
Nuestro trabajo consiste en seleccionar la expresión facial de un agente virtual, que mejor represente una cierta combinación de atributos generados por un modelo comportamental (el estado emocional, la actitud y la intención). Siendo esto una primera aportación a la futura creación de un modelo kinésico que manipule todas las expresiones no verbales que el agente podrá transmitir."

With the rise in popularity of chatbot and virtual-agent platforms, from Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and more, a new design discipline is emerging: Conversational UX Design. While it is easy to create natural language interfaces with these platforms, creating an effective and engaging user experience is still a major challenge. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have given us powerful tools for analyzing bits of language, but they do not tell us how to string those bits together to make a natural conversation. Natural conversation has a sequential organization that is independent of the organization of language itself. At IBM Research-Almaden, we are addressing this user experience (UX) design challenge by applying formal, qualitative models from the field of Conversation Analysis to the design of conversational agents. Our Natural Conversation Framework (NCF) is a design framework for conversational user experience. It provides a library of generic conversational UX patterns that are inspired by natural human conversation patterns and that are agnostic to platform and input method (text or voice). This chapter will cover the four components of our Natural Conversation Framework: (1) an interaction model, (2) common activity modules, (3) a navigation method and (4) a set of sequence metrics. In addition, it will briefly outline a general process for designing conversational UX: from mock-up to working prototype.

"En la actualidad es común encontrar en varios sitio de Internet personajes animados, tratando de hacer la interacción humano máquina mas amigable, pero han pasado por alto la expresión y la interacción con las acciones del usuario. A fin de mejorar esta interacción, es necesario realizar un estudio sobre las expresiones no verbales, así como de los movimientos corporales en una persona, con el fin de comprender y desarrollar un registro de las gesticulaciones.
El propósito de esta tesis no es solo proporcionar un conocimiento de cómo se reúnen y anima las características de un personaje, sino que propone una metodología para el análisis y creación de personajes virtuales. Los cuales permitieron de manera sencilla animar un personaje en flash CS3.
Este documento ha sido diseñado y revisado cuidadosamente para facilitar la creación de personajes animados que expresen comportamientos sociales."

This chapter deals with the communication of persuasion. Only a small percentage of communication involves words: as the old saying goes, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”. While this likely underestimates the importance of good verbal persuasion techniques, it is accurate in underlining the critical role of non-verbal behaviour during face-to-face communication. In this chapter we restrict the discussion to body language. We also consider embodied virtual agents. As is the case with humans, there are a number of fundamental factors to be considered when constructing persuasive agents. In particular, one who wishes to persuade must appear credible, trustworthy, confident and non-threatening. Knowing how not to behave is also a vital basis for effective persuasion. This includes resolving task constraints or other factors with the social perception considerations. These social virtual agents face many of the same problems as humans have in controlling and expressing themselves in an appropriate manner so as to establish and maintain persuasive interaction. All along the chapter, much of our discussion will handle concepts applicable both to agent and human behaviour.

"Es conocido que la comunicación no verbal involucra el uso de expresiones faciales, gestuales y posturas para comunicar intenciones, objetivos, sentimientos e ideas; lo que permite reforzar un mensaje dentro de una dinámica de diálogo. Las habilidades de comunicación no verbal son propias de los seres humanos y por más de una década los investigadores han intentado transferir dicha riqueza a un personaje virtual, y a través de esto facilitar la comunicación hombre-máquina.
En la actualidad la comunicación no verbal juega un papel importante en el desarrollo de personajes virtuales, debido a que es un medio que permite mostrar rasgos de personalidad, manifestar un estado de ánimo y reforzar la expresión verbal, buscando así un vínculo de empatía entre el usuario y el personaje.
En esta tesis se desarrolló una metodología para identificar a través de un diseño experimental y una serie de pruebas estadísticas, el conjunto mínimo de atributos que permita caracterizar las expresiones gestuales semióticas (brazos y manos) de personajes virtuales, considerando la influencia de la personalidad, el estado emocional y actos del habla. Los resultados de esta investigación muestran que el conjunto mínimo con el que se caracterizó a la expresión gestual permite discriminar entre gestos deícticos e icónicos.
La integración de los rasgos de personalidad y estado emocional durante el proceso de caracterización tiene como propósito emular la riqueza de la comunicación humana, buscando tornar creíble al personaje virtual y por consiguiente incrementar la inmersión en el mundo virtual en el que se desenvuelve el personaje."

Social interaction in virtual universe opens new horizons in the field of information technologies, and particularly, in the use of video games for professional purposes (a.k.a. serious game). Introducing a certain level of realism in the social and emotional interactions of virtual characters makes it possible to consider many professional applications, which could have only been developed until now in the field of human-human interaction.
The main difficulty of this approach is to produce a human interaction dynamic that makes sense for the tasks and actions that must be achieved by the characters. In order to develop this kind of dynamics, we have referred to (i) the approaches of situated cognition (so as to take into account the role of the objects of the environment), and (ii) representational approaches for the production of speech acts.
We focus on the production of verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal interactions between a human and a virtual character in the context of virtual therapy. Initially, we were interested in the description of the dynamics of the visual, gesture and verbal interactions between a patient and a real therapist. This study enabled us to categorize the phases of dialogue and to elaborate a model of the dynamics of the interaction, taking into account the personality of the actors, their intentions, and their verbal and gesture behaviours.
From this model, we have elaborated a generic architecture, which is articulated around a behavioural model and a kinesics model. The behavioural model selects the speech acts and
the attitude of the character (empathic, neutral, etc). The kinesics model selects and integrates the facial, posture and gesture expressions related to the results of the behavioural model.
From a theoretical point of view, we were interested in the concept of presence in order to identify which was the nature of the relevant couplings making it possible to produce a feeling of social presence (i.e. a feeling of living a social interaction not mediated by the elements of the technical device for the human actors which animate their characters).
Finally, the device was used within the framework of a research program on the concept of mirror neurons. The assumption is that the presentation of a virtual image of its handicapped member to the patient would enable him to better recover. For this purpose,
IRMf tests associated with each experiment would allow to confirm or to invalidate the role of these mirror neurons in the process of recovery.

The designers of virtual agents often draw on a large research literature in psychology, linguistics and human ethology to design embodied agents that can interact with people. In this paper, we consider a structural acting system developed by Francois Delsarte as a possible resource in designing the nonverbal behavior of embodied agents. Using human subjects, we evaluate one component of the system, Delsarte's Cube, that addresses the meaning of differing attitudes of the hand in gestures.

"Este trabajo de investigación se origina a partir de un proyecto de la Universidad de Barcelona para desarrollar habilidades en el diagnóstico del Trastorno de Ansiedad Generalizada a estudiantes de psicología y psiquiatría utilizando un chatbot, el cual es un programa que intenta simular una conversación humana con una persona [Laven, 1996].

La problemática que abordamos en éste documento, es convertir un chatbot en un agente conversacional capaz de generar diálogos creíbles y dinámicos en lenguaje natural, expresando en sus diálogos rasgos de personalidad, emociones y su intensidad. Para la generación de diálogos creíbles, proponemos realizar una extensión al lenguaje AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), proponiendo una nueva estructura para los
archivos de conocimiento basados en AIML, la cual será la estructura de la base de conocimientos de nuestro agente conversacional.

El agente conversacional, mediante diálogos creíbles, es capaz de crear escenarios más reales para que el estudiante diagnostique de forma contundente el padecimiento simulado por el agente conversacional. Para determinar si los usuarios perciben que a través del diálogo textual se expresa una emoción y para determinar si una imagen refuerza la emoción transmitida en los diálogos se aplicó una encuesta. Las emociones evaluadas fueron Miedo, Alegría, Tristeza, Enojo, Angustia, Placer, Sorpresa y Resignación. La encuesta se dividió en dos partes y muestra una pequeña conversación entre un usuario y el ECA, en la primera parte, se utilizaron sólo frases y en la segunda, éstas fueron reforzadas con imágenes del agente conversacional, acordes a la emoción a transmitir en el diálogo. Los resultados muestran que el porcentaje de identificación de la emoción y de su intensidad en las frases fueron del 57.50% y del 43.92% y que los porcentajes de identificación al reforzar las frases con imágenes fueron del 70.51% y del 55.35%, respectivamente. Estos resultados indican que utilizar imágenes reforzando a las frases contribuye en la identificación de las emociones y de sus intensidades."

En la actualidad los personajes virtuales están aplicados en contrastantes contextos como la educación, salud o entrenamiento. Las aplicaciones de los personajes no solo modelan procesos cognitivos, toma de decisiones y aspectos de conducta social, sino que pretenden comunicarse a través de medios verbales y no verbales. Este trabajo presenta un método de caracterización de la expresión no verbal con connotación emocional y de personalidad para un caso aplicativo de un tutor de matemáticas.

Building a long-term relationship between human and virtual agent remains a challenge. This paper explores the influence of intimate behavioral cues and the impact of different interaction modalities (voice, text, gesture) on our perception of intimacy. We built a virtual Tourism Information (TI) counselor capable of intimate behaviors based on grounded theories of intimacy developed in psychology. We studied how external observers perceive the social behaviors of the agent during its interactions with a human tourist. Our originality is to evaluate the perception of social skills across the interaction. Our results show that nonverbal behaviors of the virtual agent reinforces the impact of verbal cues on human perception on virtual intimacy. Findings also suggest that textual medium of communication has a negative impact on the perception of virtual intimacy, whatever the level of animation and intimacy exhibited by the TI counselor. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Social engineering (social sciences); • Applied computing → Psychology;

This paper presents an approach to incorporate emotion regulation as addressed within psychology literature into virtual characters. To this end, first Gross' informal theory of emotion regulation has been formalised using a dynamical system style modelling approach. Next, a virtual environment has been created, involving a number of virtual agents, which have been equipped with the formalised model for emotion regulation. This environment has been used to successfully generate a number of emergent virtual stories, in which characters regulate their emotions by applying regulation strategies such as situation selection and attentional deployment. The behaviours shown in the stories were found consistent with descriptions of human regulation processes.

Emotions and personality have received quite a lot of attention the last few years in research on embodied conversational agents. Attention is also increasingly being paid to matters of social psychology and interpersonal aspects (see , for example, and [11], for work of our group). Given the nature of an embodied conversational agent's main activity: "conversation", we feel that interpersonal issues should be central in their design. We consider the case of tutoring systems in more depth and examine some of the interpersonal factors that need to be accounted for when building emotionally intelligent tutors.

Modern virtual agents require knowledge about their environment, the interaction itself, and their interlocutors' behavior in order to be able to show appropriate nonverbal behavior as well as to adapt dialog policies accordingly. Recent achievements in the area of automatic behavior recognition and understanding can provide information about the interactants' multimodal nonverbal behavior and subsequently their affective states. In this paper, we introduce a perception markup language (PML) which is a first step towards a standardized representation of perceived nonverbal behaviors. PML follows several design concepts, namely compatibility and synergy, modeling uncertainty, multiple interpretative layers, and extensibility, in order to maximize its usefulness for the research community. We show how we can successfully integrate PML in a fully automated virtual agent system for healthcare applications.

Psychology suggests highly synchronized expressions of emotion across different modalities. Few experiments jointly studied the relative contribution of facial expression and body posture to the overall perception of emotion. Computational models for expressive virtual characters have to consider how such combinations will be perceived by users. This paper reports on two studies exploring how subjects perceived a virtual agent. The first study evaluates the contribution of the facial and postural expressions to the overall perception of basic emotion categories, as well as the valence and activation dimensions. The second study explores the impact of incongruent expressions on the perception of superposed emotions which are known to be frequent in everyday life. Our results suggest that the congruence of facial and bodily expression facilitates the recognition of emotion categories. Yet, judgments were mainly based on the emotion expressed in the face but were nevertheless affected by postures for the perception of the activation dimension.

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces, yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. In this paper, we present EMBR, a new realtime character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of control, the animation layer, is necessary to keep the higher-level control layers (behavioral/functional) consistent and slim, while allowing a unified and abstract access to the animation engine, e.g. for the procedural animation of nonverbal behavior. We describe the EMBRScript animation layer, the architecture of the EMBR engine, its integration into larger project contexts, and conclude with a concrete application.

How do we construct credible personalities? The current SAL (Sensitive Artificial Listeners) characters were constructed intuitively and can be unconvincing. In addressing these issues, this paper considers a theory of personality and associated emotional traits, and discusses how behaviours associated with personality types in people may be adapted to develop characteristics of virtual agents. Our objective is to ensure that behavioural perceptions of a virtual agent credibly reflect the agent's 'actual' personality as prescribed.

Human beings have adopted tools, pets, technology, especially computer science and Deep Learning (DL) in Virtual Intelligent Assistants (VIA). Digital technical assistance systems that predict the future in culture, business and politics are now in demand. The experience gained with Deep Learning (DL) is to be mapped to a model of a Virtual Intelligent Assistant (VIA) for social science, culture and economics. The Deep Learning (DL) model is based on an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that contains artificial nodes (simplified nerve cells) and artificial neurons (simplified synapses). The special feature is that the artificial nodes (simplified nerve cells) are arranged in several hidden layers with autonomous filtering processes. Autonomous filters in the artificial nodes (simplified nerve cells) require rules that are static, i.e. time-invariant. For this purpose, the Logia of the Gospel of Thomas are proposed. It seems that the Gospel of Thomas summarizes insights and experiences from 80 thousand years of human history in 114 Logia. They are shown in outline points 1 to 114. Ultimately, the weight of the interaction determines that artificial neurons (simplified synapses) are represented in the model, as an entered statement at the output of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is to be understood. The boundaries between the machine, the individual and society continue to dissolve in the chaotic. It would be nice if world knowledge, as collected by the company Cyrorp, could be modelled. Instead of a model of world knowledge, Eva Soyah proposes the collection of Logia in subdivision points 1 to 114 and Permanent Truths from item 115.

In today's digital era, the emerge of IOT and linked devices, cyber security experts come across a lot of encounters. The specialists require all the aid to overcome attacks, security cracks, its affects and respond to the attacks. A lot of linked workplaces lead to heavy traffic, high security attack vectors, security breaches and many more that the cyber environment cannot be handled by humans without sizeable automation. It is not easy to create software managed system with standard working algorithms (hard-wired logic on deciding level) for successfully cautious against the prominently growing attacks in networks. It is a evident fact that number of cyber security problems are now settled as an add on with progress only procedures of Artificial Intelligence techniques unit acquiring utilized. Cyber Security applications and analyses can now be moulded with AI applications and its existing methods.

To develop believable agents, agents should be highly autonomous, situated, flexible, and emotional. By this study, our aim is to present an agent architecture called Reactive-Causal Architecture that supports development of believable agents.

Abtract:
Los personajes virtuales cada vez más se están utilizando como un medio de interacción entre el usuario y una máquina, por tal motivo surge la necesidad de que dichos personajes se comuniquen a través de expresiones verbales y no verbales. En este artículo se presenta la metodología para realizar el proceso de caracterización de expresiones gestuales semióticas (brazos y manos) en personajes virtuales, considerando la influencia de la personalidad y el estado emocional. La integración de estos rasgos durante el proceso de caracterización tiene como fin emular la riqueza de la comunicación humana, buscando tornar creíble al personaje virtual y por consiguiente incrementar el
sentido de inmersión.

FACSHuman is a software that allows researchers to create, through three-dimensional modeling, experimental material that can be used in nonverbal communication and emotional facial expressions researches. It thus offers the possibility of practically manipulating all the Action Units presented in the Facial Action Coding System[6]. But also, the morphological parameters of the entire body and face.

This research focuses on the artificial creation of the conditions that were necessary or facilitated language in its evolution. I propose a model for a system that has the capability to allow a complex communication protocol to evolve. In human language learning, the adult humans have already mastered the language and use their knowledge to teach infant humans. 50.000 B.C. (or whenever) when there were no adult masters of language, what conditions were necessary for the language-less homo sapiens to start developing the first language? Can machines evolve a language in a similar manner across generations? This research deals with facilitating the genesis of a communication system using evolutionary computation and reinforcement learning when initially none of the conspirators have mastered the system.

We thought that, virtual reality cannot merely be reduced to a hardware system, another way to achieve the optimal experience, is to produce a sense of immersion associated to an emotional and social experience inside the virtual environment. We believe that Virtual Characters that express a social and emotional behavior in their interaction could produce a sense of immersion in the user that interact with them. We propose to use this kind of character to develop social and emotional interfaces, capable to produce a believable Social Interaction.

Digital Games are complex systems and the build-in adversaries have to fulfill many requirements regarding usability, error-robustness and a certain degree of intelligence. Creating such an adversary can be a difficult task. To create a new agent for a digital game it is first and foremost required to exactly know the rules of the game. After completely obtaining this rule-set the yet more difficult part begins. The designer of the agent has to create a new or adapt an existing Artificial Intelligence (AI). This AI will later on be used by an artificial player, which should be able to apply these rules in a somewhat intelligent way. This creation and afterwards the balancing does not only consume an enormous amount of time it is also prone to errors. To create a believable artificial player the designer has to know how to apply the rules correctly and he or she must also must be able to create the impression of intelligent behavior which is a difficult task—if not art.

In this paper we describe the implementation of interactive agents capable of gathering and extending their knowledge. Interactive agents are designed to perform tasks requested by a user in natural language. Using simple sentences the agent can answer questions and in case a task can not be fulfilled the agent must communicate with the user. In particular, an interactive agent can tell when necessary information for a task is missing, giving the user a chance to supply this information, which may in effect result in teaching the agent. The interactive agent platform is implemented in DLP, a tool for the implementation of 3D web agents. In this paper we discuss the motivation for interactive agents, the learning mechanisms and it's realization in the DLP platform.

In this paper, we propose a pluridisciplinary approach to model emotional and social interfaces through Intelligent Virtual Agents. This model has been implemented as a virtual therapist1. Our research are interested in the simulation of the emotional and reflexive’s dimensions of a human interaction. We thought that this kind of simulation could produce a sense of social and emotional immersion, and thus, to improve the human-computer interaction.

One of the major problems of user's interaction with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) is to have the conversation last more than few second: after being amused and intrigued by the ECAs, users may find rapidly the restrictions and limitations of the dialog systems, they may perceive the repetition of the ECAs animation, they may find the behaviors of ECAs to be inconsistent and implausible, etc. We believe that some special links, or bonds, have to be established between users and ECAs during interaction. It is ...

In this paper we present an implementation of a embodied conversational agent that serves as a virtual tour guide in Second Life. We show how we combined the abilities of a conversational agent with navigation in the world and present some preliminary evaluation results.