Mitsuru Ishizuka - Böcker

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology. Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

The Paci?c Rim International Conferences on Arti?cial Intelligence (PRICAI) are biennial international events. The PRICAI series aims at stimulating - search by promoting exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas among di?erent branches of Arti?cial Intelligence. It also provides a common forum for rese- chers and practitioners in various ?elds of AI to exchange new ideas and share their experience. This volume contains the proceedings of the 7th Paci?c Rim Internat- nal Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (PRICAI 2002) heldin Tokyo, Japan. PRICAI 2002 received161 submissions from 25 countries. From these, 57 papers (35%) were acceptedfor presentation andare includedin this volume. Over 30 papers were acceptedfor poster presentations, anda 1-page abstract for each poster is includedin this volume. All submittedpapers were refereedby two or more reviewers selectedby the Program Committee members. The reviewers' comments were carefully examinedanddiscussedby the members of the P- gram Committee to ensure fairness andconsistency in the selection process. The papers in this volume give an indication of new trends in Arti?cial Intelligence.The topics covered include AI Foundations, Knowledge Repres- tation andReasoning, Constraint Satisfaction, Machine Learning, Knowledge Acquisition andManagement, Agents andTheir Applications, Neural Networks, Document Analysis andCategorization, Internet/Web Intelligence, Multimedia andEmotion, Intelligent Robots, andMachine Perception.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2008, held in Tokyo, Japan, in September 2008. The 18 revised full papers and 28 revised short papers presented together 42 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on motion and empathy; narrative and augmented reality; conversation and negotiation; nonverbal behavior; models of culture and personality; markup and representation languages; architectures for robotic agents; cognitive architectures; agents for healthcare and training; and agents in games, museums and virtual worlds.

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology. Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.