<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 14"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 14"> <link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CCATHER%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml">  <link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CCATHER%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"> <link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CCATHER%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml">  <style>  </style> Modeling Virtual Coaches<o:p></o:p> Adviser: Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS-ISIR<o:p></o:p> The European Horizon-2020 project Council of Coaches aims to develop a tool in which virtual embodied coaches form a team of experts that can discuss amongst themselves and with the user how the user could improve his healthy lifestyle behaviors. The project combines state of the art 3D Virtual Avatars with language and reasoning technology and applies this to the area of lifestyle and behavior change coaching.<o:p></o:p> The goal of PhD is to design, implement and evaluate user interaction with the team of virtual agents, the council of coaches (Home Interface) and one-on-one interaction with a single coach (Mobile Interface). In particular it focuses on<o:p></o:p> 1. modelling coaches with their own specific agenda and behaviour style aiming at creating unique social relationships with users. <o:p></o:p> 2. Adapting virtual coaches’ behavior to ensure that user maintains his involvement in the relationship with the coaches. <o:p></o:p> Specific attention will be given to the development of virtual coaches with a wide variety of behavioural characteristics and personality traits. Several studies have shown how low level features such as behaviour expressivity and high level characteristic (e.g. personality traits ) affect user’s involvement in their interaction with the virtual characters and impact his performances (McRorie et al., 2011) (Paiva et al., 2017)). <o:p></o:p> The work in this PhD will make use of and build upon the GRETA/VIB platform developed at UPMC (Pecune et al., 2014) for multimodal behaviour generation and for visualizing virtual coaches. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> To apply, send a CV, names of reference, master grades to <a href="mailto:catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr">catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr</a><o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> </body> </html>