extended-abstract

Public Access

Time to Go ONLINE! A Modular Framework for Building Internet-based Socially Interactive Agents

Authors:

Mihai Polceanu,

Christine LisettiAuthors Info & Claims

IVA '19: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Pages 227 - 229

https://doi.org/10.1145/3308532.3329452

Published: 01 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Although socially interactive agents have emerged as a new metaphor for human-computer interaction, they are, to date, absent from the Internet. We describe the design choices, implementation, and challenges in building EEVA, the first fully integrated platform-independent framework for deploying realistic 3D web-based social agents: with real-time multimodal perception of, and response to, the user's verbal and non-verbal social cues, EEVA agents are capable of communicating rich customizable content to users in real time, while building and maintaining users' profiles for long-term interactions. The modularity of the EEVA framework enables it to be used as a testbed for agents' social communication model development of increasing performance and sophistication (e.g. building rapport, expressing empathy). We discuss the framework's feasibility by analyzing the response time of the system over the Internet, in the context of a health intervention built using EEVA authoring functionalities.

References

[1]

R. Amini, C. Lisetti, and G. Ruiz. 2015. HapFACS 3.0: FACS-based facial expression generator for 3D speaking virtual characters . IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol. 6, 4 (2015).

Digital Library

[2]

Maryam Ashoori, Chunyan Miao, Majid Nili, and Mehdi Amoui. 2008. Economically inspired self-healing model for Multi-Agent Systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT 2007, Vol. 2. 261--264.

Digital Library

[3]

Janet B. Bavelas, Alex Black, Charles R. Lemery, and Jennifer Mullett. 1986. "I show how you feel": Motor mimicry as a communicative act. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 50, 2 (1986), 322--329.

[4]

Amy L Baylor. 2011. The design of motivational agents and avatars. Educational Technology Research and Development, Vol. 59, 2 (2011), 291--300.

[5]

Rafael A Calvo and Sidney D'Mello. 2010. Affect detection: An interdisciplinary review of models, methods, and their applications . IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol. 1, 1 (2010), 18--37.

Digital Library

[6]

M. Courgeon and C. Clavel. 2013. MARC: A framework that features emotion models for facial animation during human-computer interaction . Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Vol. 7, 4 (2013), 311--319.

[7]

Schroeder et al. 2018. Pocket Skills: A Conversational Mobile Web App To Support Dialectical Behavioral Therapy . Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018) (2018), 1--15.

Digital Library

[8]

Wagner et al. 2013. The Social Signal Interpretation ( SSI ) Framework Multimodal Signal Processing and Recognition in Real-Time. In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference . 1--4.

Digital Library

[9]

JE Grahe. 1999. The importance of nonverbal cues in judging rapport . Journal of Nonverbal behavior, Vol. 23, 4 (1999), 253--269.

[10]

Ouriel Grynszpan, Jean Claude Martin, and Philippe Fossati. 2017. Gaze leading is associated with liking . Acta Psychologica, Vol. 173 (2017), 66--72.

[11]

Lixing Huang, Louis-philippe Morency, and Jonathan Gratch. 2011. Virtual Rapport 2.0. In International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 68--79.

Digital Library

[12]

Joris H. Janssen. 2012. A three-component framework for empathic technologies to augment human interaction . Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Vol. 6, 3--4 (2012), 143--161.

[13]

Stefan Kopp, Brigitte Krenn, Stacy Marsella, A Marshall, C Pelachaud, H Pirker, K Thó risson, and H Vilhjá lmsson. 2006. Towards a common framework for multimodal generation: The behavior markup language. In Intelligent Virtual Agents (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Jonathan Gratch, Michael Young, Ruth Aylett, Daniel Ballin, and Patrick Olivier (Eds.), Vol. 4133. Springer, 205--217.

Digital Library

[14]

Christine Lisetti, Reza Amini, Ugan Yasavur, and Naphtali Rishe. 2013. I can help you change! an empathic virtual agent delivers behavior change health interventions . ACM TMIS, Vol. 4, 4 (2013), 19.

Digital Library

[15]

Gerard Llorach and Josep Blat. 2017. Say Hi to Eliza. In International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. 255--258.

[16]

Magalie Ochs, Catherine Pelachaud, and Gary McKeown. 2017. A User-Perception Based Approach to Create Smiling Embodied Conversational Agents . ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Vol. 7, 1 (2017), 1--33.

Digital Library

[17]

Ana Paiva, Iolanda Leite, Hana Boukricha, and Ipke Wachsmuth. 2017. Empathy in Virtual Agents and Robots . ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Vol. 7, 3 (2017).

Digital Library

[18]

Catherine Pelachaud. 2009. Modelling multimodal expression of emotion in a virtual agent. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Vol. 364, 1535 (dec 2009), 3539--48.

[19]

Pedro Pena, Christine Lisetti, Mihai Polceanu, and Ubbo Visser. 2018. eEVA: Real-time Web-based Affective Agents for Human-Robot Interface. In RoboCup 2018: Robot World Cup XXII. Montreal, Canada, Springer International Publishing.

[20]

Morgan Quigley, Ken Conley, Brian Gerkey, Josh Faust, Tully Foote, Jeremy Leibs, Rob Wheeler, and Andrew Y Ng. 2009. ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System. In ICRA workshop on open source software, Vol. 3. Kobe, Japan, 5.

[21]

Vikram Ramanarayanan, David Pautler, Patrick Lange, and David Suendermann-Oeft. 2018. Interview with an avatar: A real-time cloud-based virtual dialog agent for educational and job training applications. Technical Report Research Memorandum No. RM-18-02. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. 1--8 pages.

[22]

L. Tickle-Degnen and Robert Rosenthal. 1990. The nature of rapport and its nonverbal correlates . Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 1, 4 (1990), 285--293.

[23]

Website. 2019. WebRTC project. https://webrtc.org . Accessed Mar 2019.

[24]

U. Yasavur, C. Lisetti, and N. Rishe. 2014. Let's talk! speaking virtual counselor offers you a brief intervention . Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Vol. 8, 4 (2014).

Cited By

Shubham KVenkatesan LJayagopi DTumuluri R(2022)Multimodal Embodied Conversational Agents: A discussion of architectures, frameworks and modules for commercial applications2022 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR)10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00013(36-45)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00013
Pasternak KWu ZVisser ULisetti C(2022)Towards Building Rapport with a Human Support RobotRoboCup 2021: Robot World Cup XXIV10.1007/978-3-030-98682-7_18(214-225)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98682-7_18
Boustani MLunn SVisser ULisetti C(2021)Development, Feasibility, Acceptability, and Utility of an Expressive Speech-Enabled Digital Health Agent to Deliver Online, Brief Motivational Interviewing for Alcohol Misuse: Descriptive StudyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/2583723:9(e25837)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.2196/25837
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Time to Go ONLINE! A Modular Framework for Building Internet-based Socially Interactive Agents

Recommendations

Prediction of Various Backchannel Utterances Based on Multimodal Information
IVA '23: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

The listener's backchannels are an important part of dialogues. With appropriate backchannels, people are able to smoothly promote dialogues. Thus, backchannels are considered to be important in dialogues between not only humans but also humans and ...
Extending chatterbot system into multimodal interaction framework with embodied contextual understanding
HRI '12: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction

This work aims to realize multimodal interaction with embodied contextual understanding based on the simple chatterbot system. A system framework is proposed to integrate the dialogue system into a 3D simulation platform, SIGVerse to attain multimodal ...
The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents: 20 years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics Volume 1: Methods, Behavior, Cognition

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IVA '19: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

July 2019

282 pages

ISBN:9781450366724

DOI:10.1145/3308532

General Chairs:
Catherine Pelachaud
CNRS-ISIR, Sorbonne Universite, France
,
Jean-Claude Martin
CNRS-LIMSI, Universite Paris Saclay, France
,
Program Chairs:
Hendrik Buschmeier
Bielefeld University, Germany
,
Gale Lucas
University of Southern California, USA
,
Stefan Kopp
Bielefeld University, Germany

Copyright © 2019 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2019

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Extended-abstract

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

IVA '19

Sponsor:

SIGAI

IVA '19: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

July 2 - 5, 2019

Paris, France

Acceptance Rates

IVA '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 15 of 63 submissions, 24%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
353
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)70
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)26

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Shubham KVenkatesan LJayagopi DTumuluri R(2022)Multimodal Embodied Conversational Agents: A discussion of architectures, frameworks and modules for commercial applications2022 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR)10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00013(36-45)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00013
Pasternak KWu ZVisser ULisetti C(2022)Towards Building Rapport with a Human Support RobotRoboCup 2021: Robot World Cup XXIV10.1007/978-3-030-98682-7_18(214-225)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98682-7_18
Boustani MLunn SVisser ULisetti C(2021)Development, Feasibility, Acceptability, and Utility of an Expressive Speech-Enabled Digital Health Agent to Deliver Online, Brief Motivational Interviewing for Alcohol Misuse: Descriptive StudyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/2583723:9(e25837)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.2196/25837
Barz MBhatti OLüers BPrange ASonntag D(2021)Multisensor-Pipeline: A Lightweight, Flexible, and Extensible Framework for Building Multimodal-Multisensor InterfacesCompanion Publication of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3461615.3485432(13-18)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3461615.3485432
Singh UCrawford CSherriff MMerkle LCutter PMonge ASheard J(2021)AvaFlowProceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3408877.3439620(1307-1307)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408877.3439620

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents