INESC-ID

About: INESC-ID is a nonprofit organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Context (language use). The organization has 932 authors who have published 2618 publications receiving 37658 citations.

Tell Me That Bit Again... Bringing Interactivity to a Virtual Storyteller

Abstract: Stories and storytelling are a constant presence in our lives since very early childhood. Who does not remember a story narrated by a good storyteller? However, real human storytellers do not always tell the story the same way. They observe their "audience" and adapt the way they are telling the story to better respond to their reactions. This paper focuses on how to bring interactivity to a virtual storyteller by allow- ing users to influence the story. The storyteller is a synthetic 3D granddad that uses voice, gestures and facial expressions to convey the story content to be told. The character's behaviour and the way the story is narrated, is influenced by the user's input. Such input is done by a tangible interface (a kind of mail box) where children put the cards they want in order to influence what will happen in the story being told. A preliminary usability test was made with sixteen children, with ages between nine and ten years old. The results showed that the way interactivity is introduced was quite successful.

An extended framework for characterizing social robots.

Abstract: Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with humans. We specifically contribute a framework for characterizing social robots along seven dimensions that we found to be most relevant to their design. These dimensions are: appearance, social capabilities, purpose and application area, relational role, autonomy and intelligence, proximity, and temporal profile. Within each dimension, we account for the variety of social robots through a combination of classifications and/or explanations. Our framework builds on and goes beyond existing frameworks, such as classifications and taxonomies found in the literature. More specifically, it contributes to the unification, clarification, and extension of key concepts, drawing from a rich body of relevant literature. This chapter is meant to serve as a resource for researchers, designers, and developers within and outside the field of social robotics. It is intended to provide them with tools to better understand and position existing social robots, as well as to inform their future design.

Managing emergent character-based narrative

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the role of narrative management in a character-based emergent narrative framework. The paper defines the problem and considers related work. It evaluates the role of the Game Master in non computer-based role-playing games and presents two initial implementations of a story facilitator within a character-based system using the FAtiMA agent architecture. Finally it considers what further work is required.

Cooking an ontology

Abstract: An effective solution to the problem of extending a dialogue system to new knowledge domains requires a clear separation between the knowledge and the system: as ontologies are used to conceptualize information, they can be used as a means to improve the separation between the dialogue system and the domain information. This paper presents the development of an ontology for the cooking domain, to be integrated in a dialog system. The ontology comprehends four main modules covering the key concepts of the cooking domain – actions, food, recipes, and utensils – and three auxiliary modules – units and measures, equivalencies and plate types.

Sorting Units for FPGA-Based Embedded Systems

Abstract: Sorting is an important operation for a number of embedded applications. As sorting large datasets may impose undesired performance degradation, acceleration units coupled to the embedded processor can be an interesting solution for speeding-up the computations. This paper presents and evaluates three hardware sorting units, bearing in mind embedded computing systems implemented with FPGAs. The proposed architectures take advantage of specific FPGA hardware resources to increase efficiency. Experimental results show the differences in resources and performances among the three proposed sorting units and also between the sorting units and pure software implementations for sorting.We show that a hybrid between an insertion sorting unit and a merge FIFO sorting unit provides a speed-up between 1.6 and 25 compared to a quicksort software implementation.