From the Publisher:
Cynthia Breazeal here presents her vision of the sociable robot of the future, a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated tool. A sociable robot will be able to understand us, to communicate and interact with us, to learn from us and grow with us. It will be socially intelligent in a humanlike way. Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as collaborators and companions. Because the most successful sociable robots will share our social characteristics, the effort to make sociable robots is also a means for exploring human social intelligence and even what it means to be human.
Breazeal defines the key components of social intelligence for these machines and offers a framework and set of design issues for their realization. Much of the book focuses on a nascent sociable robot she designed named Kismet. Breazeal offers a concrete implementation for Kismet, incorporating insights from the scientific study of animals and people, as well as from artistic disciplines such as classical animation. This blending of science, engineering, and art creates a lifelike quality that encourages people to treat Kismet as a social creature rather than just a machine. The book includes a CD-ROM that shows Kismet in action.

Designing Sociable Robots

Recent years have witnessed the birth of a new paradigm for learning environments: animated pedagogical agents. These lifelike autonomous characters cohabit learning environments with students to create rich, face-to-face learning interactions. This opens up exciting new possibilities; for example, agents can demonstrate complex tasks, employ locomotion and gesture to focus students' attention on the most salient aspect of the task at hand, and convey emotional responses to the tutorial situation. Animated pedagogical agents offer great promise for broadening the bandwidth of tutorial communication and increasing learning environments' ability to engage and motivate students. This article sets forth the motivations behind animated pedagogical agents, describes the key capabilities they offer, and discusses the technical issues they raise. The discussion is illustrated with descriptions of a number of animated agents that represent the current state of the art.

Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments

https://people.ict.usc.edu/~gratch/GratchMarsellaCOGSYS04.pdf

A domain-independent framework for modeling emotion

The science of interpersonal touch: An overview

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past two decades, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artifical intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of nlp, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.

/pdf/survey-of-the-state-of-the-art-in-natural-language-26vdvzdbx0.pdf

Survey of the state of the art in natural language generation: core tasks, applications and evaluation

How People LearnThe New ChildhoodOff: the Day the Internet DiedDesigning Voice User InterfacesTalk to MeUbiquitous Voice: Essays from the FieldHistory Has BegunThe Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our BrainsThe Voice in the MachineThis Is the VoiceCommunication AcousticsWired to CareWired for SoundWired for WarVoice User Interface DesignThe Audacity of HopeWired for SpeechVoice and Tone StrategyInside Deaf CultureRaising RylandReclaiming ConversationThe Public Voice of WomenInfidelDifferently WiredLeadershipThe Totally Wired DoctorHarnessedMobile Social Signal ProcessingYou Look Like a Thing and I Love YouThe Rap Year BookSandwormThe Hype MachineInvisible WomenVoice Interaction DesignFeedThe Man Who Lied to His LaptopThe Power of MusicThis Is WaterA Brief History of TimeDaemon

Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship

/pdf/deictic-and-emotive-communication-in-animated-pedagogical-362oogj7vg.pdf

Deictic and emotive communication in animated pedagogical agents

Narrative prose generation

The study of intelligent user interfaces and user modeling and adaptation is well suited for augmenting educational visits to museums. We have defined a novel integrated framework for museum visits and claim that such a framework is essential in such a vast domain that inherently implies complex interactivity. We found that it requires a significant investment in software and hardware infrastructure, design and implementation of intelligent interfaces, and a systematic and iterative evaluation of the design and functionality of user interfaces, involving actual visitors at every stage. We defined and built a suite of interactive and user-adaptive technologies for museum visitors, which was then evaluated at the Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento, Italy: (1) animated agents that help motivate visitors and focus their attention when necessary, (2) automatically generated, adaptive video documentaries on mobile devices, and (3) automatically generated post-visit summaries that reflect the individual interests of visitors as determined by their behavior and choices during their visit. These components are supported by underlying user modeling and inference mechanisms that allow for adaptivity and personalization. Novel software infrastructure allows for agent connectivity and fusion of multiple positioning data streams in the museum space. We conducted several experiments, focusing on various aspects of PEACH. In one, conducted with 110 visitors, we found evidence that even older users are comfortable interacting with a major component of the system.

/pdf/adaptive-intelligent-presentation-of-information-for-the-3lgz063cke.pdf

Adaptive, intelligent presentation of information for the museum visitor in PEACH

Lifelike animated agents for knowledge - based learning environments can provide timely , customized advice to support students' problem solving . Because of their strong visual presence , they hold significant promise for substantially increasing students' enjoyment of their learning experiences . A key problemposed by lifelike agents that inhabit artificial worlds is deictic believability. In the same manner that humans refer to objects in their environment through judicious combinations of speech , locomotion , and gesture , animated agents should be able to move through their environment and point to and refer to objects appropriately as they provide problem - solving advice . In this paper we describe a framework for achieving deictic believability in animated agents . A deictic behavior planner exploits a world model and the evolving explanation plan as it selects and coordinates locomotive , gestural , and speech behaviors . The resulting behaviors and utterances are believable , and the references...

Charles B. Callaway

Papers

Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship

Deictic and emotive communication in animated pedagogical agents

Narrative prose generation

Adaptive, intelligent presentation of information for the museum visitor in PEACH

Deictic believability: Coordinated gesture, locomotion, and speech in lifelike pedagogical agents