INESC-ID

About: INESC-ID is a nonprofit organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Field-programmable gate array & Control theory. The organization has 932 authors who have published 2618 publications receiving 37658 citations.

Mind the body: filling the gap between minds and bodies in synthetic characters

Abstract: Interactive virtual environments (IVEs) are inhabited by synthetic characters that guide and engage children in a wide variety of activities, like playing games or learning new things. To build those environments, we need believable autonomous synthetic characters that are able to think and act in very dynamic environments. These characters have often able minds that are limited by the actions that the body can do. In one hand, we have minds capable of creating interesting non-linear behaviour; on the other hand, we have bodies that are limited by the number of animations they can perform. This usually leads to a large planning effort to anticipate possible situations and define which animations are necessary. When we aim at non-linear narrative and non-deterministic plots, there is an obvious gap between what minds can think and what bodies can do. We propose smart bodies as way to fill this gap between minds and bodies. A smart body extends the notion of standard body since it is enriched with semantic information and can do things on its own. The mind still decides what the character should do, but the body chooses how it is done. Smart bodies, like standard bodies, have a model and a collection of animations which are provided by a graphics engine. But they also have access to knowledge about other elements in the world like locations, interaction information and particular attributes. At this point, the notions of interaction spot and action trigger come into play. Interaction spots are specific positions around smart bodies or items where other smart bodies can do particular interactions. Action triggers define automatic reactions which are triggered by smart bodies when certain actions or interactions occur. We use both these constructs to create abstract references for physical elements, to act as a resource and pre-condition mechanisms, and to simulate physics using rule-based reactions. Smart bodies use all this information to create high-level actions which are used by the minds. Thus, minds operate at a higher level and do not have to deal with low-level body geometry or physics. Smart bodies were used in FearNot!, an anti-bullying application. In FearNot! children experience virtual stories generated in real-time where they can witness (from a third-person perspective) a series of bullying situations towards a character. Clearly, in such an emergent narrative scenario, minds need to work at a higher-level of abstraction without worrying with bodies and how a particular action is carried out at low-level. Smart bodies provided this abstraction layer. We performed a small study to validate our work in FearNot! with positive results. We believe there may be other applications where smart bodies have much to offer, particularly when using unscripted and non-linear narrative approaches.

InStory: a system for mobile information access, storytelling and gaming activities in physical spaces

Abstract: This paper describes the work carried out in the InStory project. InStory has the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile storytelling, information access, and gaming activities. The platform has a flexible computational architecture that integrates heterogeneous devices, different media formats and computational support for different narrative modes and gaming activities. The system is driven and validated by a set of story threads and narratives that are centered on the exploration of physical spaces. This exploration is combined with the perspective of sharing information between users and providing historic context. The project also wants to explore the social aspect of shared narratives and activities, with the idea that the technology can provide new innovative approaches to social participation in different types of events.

INESC-ID: A Regression Model for Large Scale Twitter Sentiment Lexicon Induction

Abstract: We present the approach followed by INESCID in the SemEval 2015 Twitter Sentiment Analysis challenge, subtask E. The goal was to determine the strength of the association of Twitter terms with positive sentiment. Using two labeled lexicons, we trained a regression model to predict the sentiment polarity and intensity of words and phrases. Terms were represented as word embeddings induced in an unsupervised fashion from a corpus of tweets. Our system attained the top ranking submission, attesting the general adequacy of the proposed approach.

Improving Adaptiveness in Autonomous Characters

Abstract: Much research has been carried out to build emotion regulation models for autonomous agents that can create suspension of disbelief in human audiences or users. However, most models up-to-date concentrate either on the physiological aspect or the cognitive aspect of emotion. In this paper, an architecture to balance the Physiological vs Cognitive dimensions for creation of life-like autonomous agents is proposed. The resulting architecture will be employed in ORIENT which is part of the EU-FP6 project eCircus. An explanation of the existing architecture, FAtiMA focusing on its benefits and flaws is provided. This is followed by a description of the proposed architecture that combines FAtiMA and the PSI motivational system. Some inspiring work is also reviewed. Finally, a conclusion and directions for future work are given.