Blätter der Wohlfahrtspflege (BdW) , Seite 59 - 61

Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a scalability problem. This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach, this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers. Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach.

The key to mission performance is the capability of a UAV operator to command and monitor automation as well as his ability to coordinate its actions towards achieving the current task. In order to reproduce such capabilities onboard an unmanned aircraft to a certain extent, we present an approach to introduce an Artificial Cognitive Unit (ACU), acting as an onboard agent supervisor. The ACU commands and controls all onboard automation and acts as a single mission management system subordinate to the human supervisor. For this purpose the term “Agent Supervisory Control” is introduced. In this context onboard automation represents UAV capabilities that can be deployed by the agent supervisor to achieve tasks issued by the operator. These capabilities are managed by the ACU according to their availability, to task and to system constraints. The implementation of the cognitive agent and its automation components, integrated into a UAV system architecture is described. The system has been tested in real-flight experiments and results on in-mission planning and decision making are presented.

This paper investigates user perceptions of continuous identity as agents migrate between different embodiments. It reports an experiment seeking to establish whether migrating or not migrating the interaction memory of the agent would affect the user's perception of consistent agent identity over different embodiments. The experiment involved a treasure hunt in which a virtual agent migrated from a screen to a mobile phone in order to accompany a user while they searched for clues. A total of 45 subjects took part in three different conditions with 15 subjects in each. The outcome showed that the presence of memory affected the competence users ascribed to the virtual agent. However it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.

This paper discusses an experiment examining the impact of interaction memory on user perceptions of a virtual agent with multiple embodiments and migration between them. The outcome showed users perceived agents with memory as more competent, but it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments

We investigate the relationship between the embodiment of an artificial companion and user perception and interaction with it. In a Wizard of Oz study, 42 users interacted with one of two embodiments: a physical robot or a virtual agent on a screen through a role-play of secretarial tasks in an office, with the companion providing essential assistance. Findings showed that participants in both condition groups when given the choice would prefer to interact with the robot companion, mainly for its greater physical or social presence. Subjects also found the robot less annoying and talked to it more naturally. However, this preference for the robotic embodiment is not reflected in the users’ actual rating of the companion or their interaction with it. We reflect on this contradiction and conclude that in a task-based context a user focuses much more on a companion’s behaviour than its embodiment. This underlines the feasibility of our efforts in creating companions that migrate between embodiments while maintaining a consistent identity from the user’s point of view.

Migration is the ability of an agent to transfer from one embodiment, for example a robot, to another such as a mobile phone. For agents that are to act as personal companions migration is desirable as access to different capabilities can provide more constant companionship to a user. This interactive demonstration of screen to phone migration illustrates one application of the open-source architecture developed on the LIREC project to support migration of an affective agent across many types of embodiment.

We describe CMION, an open source architecture for coordinating the various sensors and effectors of an artificial intelligent agent with its mind, i.e. the high level decision making processes. The architecture was designed to work for virtual graphical agents, including those on mobile devices, as well as robots. Its built-in migration feature allows a character to move between these differing embodiments, inhabiting them in turn. We emphasize the importance of modularity for an architecture supporting migration and highlight design decisions promoting modularity in CMION. An applied example of the architecture's use in a migration situation is given.

In this paper, we present an approach to monitor human activities such as entry, exit and break times of people in a workplace environment. The companion robot then learns the users' presence patterns over a period of time through memory generalisation and plans a suitable time for recharging itself causing less hindrance to human-robot interaction.

This work proposes the concept of a so-called Knowledge Configured Vehicle (KCV). In our current UAV research we investigate approaches, which enable vehicles to perform missions on a higher level of autonomy by AI-based onboard decision functions working in cooperation with a human operator. In order to achieve platform independence of such UAV mission management functions and at the same time providing full access to low-level system functions, we developed and flight tested a prototype following the design concept of such a Knowledge Configured Vehicle. A KCV is characterized by the separation of high level mission capabilities related knowledge from the physical vehicle implementation related knowledge. Therefore, we use our Cognitive System Architecture (COSA). COSA generates system behaviors on the basis of explicit knowledge models. In a KCV a mission-specific, but vehicle independent knowledge package is combined with a vehicle specific, but mission independent knowledge package, each of which interchangeable as according to the vehicle implementation and the mission needs. A field prototype of a KCV based upon our small helicopter UAV has been developed and demonstrated in a real-world flight trial performing a simple sensor deployment mission. As a result, the flight with the cognitive agent running on an on-board mission computer provides a proof of concept and shows the maturity of the implemented prototype.

ENIGMA is an experimental platform for collaborative authoring of the behaviour of autonomous virtual characters in interactive narrative applications. The main objective of this system is to overcome the bottleneck of knowledge acquisition that exists in generative storytelling systems through a combination of crowd-sourcing and machine learning. While the authoring front-end of the application is used to create short example stories set in a specific story domain, the server side of the application collects many of those stories and derives behaviour models for autonomous virtual characters such as formal planning operator descriptions from them. A mixed initiative mode increases coherence by feeding already learnt character behaviour back into the client.

In this paper we report on a Wizard of Oz interaction study with an Embodied Conversational Agent. The agent was placed on a large display in the university crush area, an informal student meeting space over the course of a week. The main goal of the experiment was to gain information about interesting conversation topics for the students in order to inform the design of an autonomous version of the agent that can act as a long term companion in a natural social setting. We report the study results, discuss the possible reasons for the lack of meaningful conversation that the ECA could elicit from the students and report on lessons learned from this experiment.

We present a demonstration of the intelligent agent-based system ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology). We summarise the application domain: education for inter-cultural empathy; the technology used and the innovations this involves; and finally interaction with ORIENT.

This paper describes the ORACLE, an embodied intelligent virtual agent designed and built for helping players of a serious game named ORIENT [1]. The game challenges players at the socio-cultural level, because it requires them to learn how to interact smoothly with alien characters in order to save their planet. The ORACLE is a virtual agent on a mobile phone, whose goal is to enhance the users’ learning in the game. The agent can both react to the players’ questions, and proactively intervene for suggesting things to users or for commenting on their performance.

Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However while other types of education activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problems of supporting educational role-play with technology have only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present some preliminary results of our first evaluation trials of ORIENT.

This paper investigates how graphically displayed intelligent virtual actors, mobile devices and innovative interaction modalities can support and enhance educational role-play as well as deepen the sense of engagement and presence in participants to produce more successful learning. The discussion will be presented using a showcase from the eCIRCUS project, ORIENT, an application combining virtual and real life role-play for social and emotional learning.

This paper provides a high level overview of a game called ORIENT which aims at cultural and emotional learning by engaging adolescents in a role-play with virtual characters in a virtual world. The paper focuses on defining and explaining the learning objectives, and gives an overview of how we intend to achieve these objectives using narrative concepts, affective characters, and innovative technologies for interaction.

In this article, we address the particular issue of authoring interactive narrative with respect to video-games and interactive storytelling . We first introduce the narrative paradox between interactivity and narrative content in virtual environments and consider its impact on game design and development. We then introduce the concept of the Emergent Narrative (EN) and the particular phil osophy it has been developed upon. Finally, we describe an authoring process for this approach that reflects on the characteristics of interacting within such a narrat ive framework.