<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> Title: Natural interactions in mixed societies: towards systems made up of humans and autonomous virtual agents Supervisors: Alexandre Pauchet and Julien Saunier Laboratory: LITIS lab, Normandy University - INSA Rouen (France) <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> Applicant profile: The candidate must have a MSc in computer science. Good knowledge or development experience in the areas of autonomous agents, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are desirable. Some knowledge in machine learning or data mining is also welcome. Application : <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:alexandre.pauchet@insa-rouen.fr"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:alexandre.pauchet@insa-rouen.fr">alexandre.pauchet@insa-rouen.fr</a></a>, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:julien.saunier@insa-rouen.fr"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:julien.saunier@insa-rouen.fr">julien.saunier@insa-rouen.fr</a></a> <ul> <li>Curriculum vitae,</li> <li>Transcripts from University</li> <li>Brief description of why the applicant is interested in the PhD position</li> <li>Contact information for two references </li> </ul> Financial support: national grant <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <h3 class="western">Description:</h3> The constant growth of ubiquitous computing and the word-wide-web, of the number of connected devices and intuitive and natural human-machine interfaces has resulted in the democratization of cyber-physical systems. Even if single-user interaction has been studied abundantly in the literature, all the scientific deadlocks are not tackled yet, especially concerning human-machine dialogue [1]. Meanwhile, the development of heterogeneous cooperative systems with multiple users and multiple software agents remains a complex task. In this PhD, the student will study the theoretical and practical means for interaction between [1..N] virtual agents and [0..m] humans (n+m>2). Innovative communication protocols will be investigated in order to propose efficient interaction whether between purely software agents or between humans and agents, where new participants may enter or leave the interaction. In this context, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) [1, 2], with a possible extension to robotic companions, will be considered as they correspond to human standards. In order to perform natural interactions, with non-intrusive interfaces, natural dialogue and non verbal interaction such as facial expressions, gestures, postures and attitudes, is preferred. Therefore, testing such natural interactive systems requires input devices to capture human verbal and non-verbal actions and attitudes, as well as output embodiment solutions for virtual agents. In this context, the LITIS (Computer Science, Information Processing and Systems Laboratory) proposes a Virtual Reality room equipped with the software and devices required to capture human gestures, facial expressions and emotions (Noldus FaceReader: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.noldus.com/human-behavior-research/products/facereader">http://www.noldus.com/human-behavior-research/products/facereader</a>), speech-to-text and equipments for the simultaneous implementation of multiple virtual agents in a virtual or a semi-virtual environment (e.g. Occulus Rift). A complete deployment architecture already exists, based on a component approach (platform MyBlock/AgentSlang: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://agent.roboslang.org/">http://agent.roboslang.org/</a>). A first approach to the subject concerns the conception of a system dedicated to ECA designers, in order for them to focus on the dialogue management and not on the animation / multimodal components. The basic idea for this prototype is that the embodied agent is autonomous and choose the animations, including emotional component, according to both the dialogue and the status of other participants in the interaction (human or agents). The modeling of such systems will be based on the concept of embodied cognition, to allow to consider users and virtual agents independently in a common interface. The possible applications of this project are: Establishment of multi-party protocols for assisting a user in the context of human learning tasks, Emotional contagion study in mixed systems, Multi-party interactive narration. References: [1] Swartout, William, Jonathan Gratch, All Hill, Eduard Hovy, Stacy Marsella, Jeff Rickel, et David Traum. 2006. « Toward virtual humans ». AI Magazine 27: 96–108. [2] Cassell, J., T. Bickmore, H. Vilhjálmsson, et H. Yan. 2000. « Human Conversation as a System Framework: Designing Embodied Conversational Agents ». Embodied Conversational Agents, avril 2000. <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- Alexandre Pauchet Associate Professor INSA Rouen - ASI Department LITIS Lab Phone: +33(0)2 32 95 98 58 Web: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://asi.insa-rouen.fr/enseignants/%7Eapauchet/">http://asi.insa-rouen.fr/enseignants/~apauchet/</a></pre> </body> </html>