Video Introduction
Course Overview
The main objective of this course is to give an overview on ECAs, their potential and use, and on the technologies involved in their creation. ECAs are human-like entities capable of communicating with other ECAs and/or users. They exhibit synchronized verbal and nonverbal behaviors (facial expression, gesture, body movement and gaze). Behaviors are defined not only by the signals that composed them but also by how they are displayed. We will present models of ECA exhibiting distinctive expressive behaviors. Displaying emotions is also an important factor in the ECA’s communication process. The course will emphasize on the communicative qualities an ECA ought to have to be able to dialog with users/other agents. The course will present the background information and computational models in these different research areas.
Course Description
We will first provide a definition of Embodied Conversational Agent where we explicit their potential roles in HCI. Through examples from research and industry, we will present several of their applications. We will highlight the wide range of their use.
Then we will turn our attention to their modeling. In particular we will offer an overview of the theoretical models of nonverbal communication on which they are based and present taxonomies for facial expressions, gesture and gaze have been elaborated.
Controlling the animation of a humanoid agent is really tedious and time consuming; especially it requires really good animation skills. Moreover having to specify manually the behaviors of these agents in real-time interactive applications is not feasible. We will introduce some representation languages that are used to control ECAs at a high level (communicative functions) and low level (behaviors).
ECAs are mainly used in real-time interactive applications. Systems architecture needs to allow for real-time as well as interactivity. Moreover interactivity means that ECAs ought to able to perceive their interlocutor and surrounding environment; they ought to have the capabilities to adapt what is being said as well as to generate verbal and non-verbal behaviors. We will end the course by describing computational emotion models and expressive behaviors.
Demo of an agent’s architecture and of tools to specify nonverbal behaviors will be offered.
Background reading:
J. Cassell, J. Sullivan, S. Prevost, E. Churchill (Editors) “Embodied Conversational Characters”, MIT Press, 2000.
H. Prendinger, M. Ishizuka (Editors), “Life-like Characters. Tools, Affective Functions and Applications”, Springer, 2004.
Z. Ruttkay, C. Pelachaud (editors), “From Brows till Trust: Evaluating Embodied Conversational Agents”, Kluwer, 2004.
Presenter
Professor Catherine Pelachaud
Presenter Biography
Catherine Pelachaud is a research director at CNRS, TELECOM ParisTech. She received her PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 1991. Her research interest includes representation language for agent, embodied conversational agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, and gesture), expressive behaviors and multimodal interfaces. She has been involved in several national and European projects related to believable and affective embodied conversational agents.