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Supporting Affective Interactions for Real-time Applications

Obiettivo

Although emotions were, for a long time, considered undesirable for rational behaviour, there are now evidences in neuroscience and psychology that place emotions as an important factor in problem solving capabilities and intelligence in general (Damasio, "Descartes' Error" 1994). As a result, a strong new field is emerging in computer science: affective computing, i.e. "computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotions" (Picard "Affective Computing", 1997). As humans interact directly with computers, it is critical for this interaction to be empowered with affective components that enrich it and make it more adequate for each individual user, but also provide "machine intelligence" with otherwise impossible capabilities.

SAFIRA will provide a framework to enrich interactions and applications with an affective dimension, bringing to the software community an enabling technology to support affective behaviour and control in real-time multi-agent systems interacting with users.

We intend to create a set of basic demonstrators of the potential of such systems: 2D and 3D virtual environments shared by synthetic characters and users, and "anthropomorphised" personality-rich personal service assistant based applications. Those demonstrators will explore the concept of a virtual environment improved by an emotional channel seamlessly integrated with the audio-visual representation of the environment. Multi-sensory interaction between participants projected cyber-selves, other participant avatars and the autonomous agents inhabiting the environment will be the means to evaluate the models developed during the project.

Objectives:
Main objective: to bring to the software community an enabling technology to support affective interactions.

Specific objectives:

1. To create a framework to enrich interactions and applications with an affective dimension.

2. To implement a toolkit for affective computing combining a set of components addressing affective knowledge acquisition, representation, reasoning, planning, communication and expression.

3. To verify under which conditions the hypothesis that emotion, as well as other affective phenomena, contributes to improve rationality and general intelligent behaviour of the synthetic characters, thus leading to more believable interactions between humans and computers.

Work description:
To achieve the main goal of SAFIRA we will research and develop along the three fundamental phases of affective computing:

1. The Affective Sensory for Autonomous Agents, where we will develop some affective sensing techniques mainly through the use of external objects (such as toys) and interpret the input from the user thought the development of techniques for affective user modelling.

2. Affective Reasoning, Planning and Learning, where the problem of embedding emotion and cognition in a machine (being it a synthetic character, an agent or even a robot) will be handled. This entails the development of techniques for affective planning, affective reasoning and decision making, personality and emotions development, learning and emergence.

3. Affective Communication and Expression, where new techniques for conveying emotions in a believable way will be developed. These three parts form the core research and also the components that will become part of an emotion-based architecture. We will integrate these components in a general toolkit that can be used in any application to achieve affective interactions with the users. To illustrate this use we will develop a set of concept demonstrators. Such demonstrators will be test cases for the verification of which conditions the hypothesis that emotion, as well as other affective phenomena, contributes to improve rationality and general intelligent behaviour of the synthetic characters thus leading to more believable interactions between humans and computers.

Milestones:
(M) Components for Affective Toys, (M) Affective User Modelling, (M) Affective Decision Making, (M) Affective Planning, (M) Affective Learning and Development, (M) Emotional Enriched Body and Facial Expression, (M) Affective Graphics.

(M) Toolkit and Framework for affective computing.

Concept demonstrators prototypes:

(M) Drawing Companion, (M) Fantasy World, and (M) Affective Personal Assistant.

(M) Evaluation of affective interactions.

Invito a presentare proposte

Data not available

Meccanismo di finanziamento

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinatore

INESC ID - INSTITUTO DE ENGENHARIA DE SISTEMAS E COMPUTADORES: INVESTIGACAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO EM LISBOA
Contributo UE
Nessun dato
Indirizzo
RUA DE ALVES REDOL 9
1000-02 LISBOA
Portogallo

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Costo totale
Nessun dato

Partecipanti (6)