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Hunting for the Holy Grail with ``emotionally intelligent'' virtual actors.

Clark Elliott
Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems
DePaul University, 243 South Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL 60604
email: elliott@ils.nwu.edu, Web: http://condor.depaul.edu/ tex2html_wrap_inline423 elliott

To appear in the first issue of ACM's Intelligence Magazine

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Formal citations:

Hunting for the Holy Grail with Emotionally-Intelligent Virtual Actors , SIGART BUlletin, 9(1), 20-28. ACM's Intelligence97 Agents, pages 40-47.

In his keynote address to the Autonomous Agents 97 conference, Danny Ellis listed four holy grail with respect to entertainment agents: (1) a [computable] science of emotion, (2) virtual actors, (3) [agent] evolution, and (4) [computable] storytelling. By framing these questions in the paradigm of a broad, albeit shallow, model of emotion, here we make the case that significant progress has been made on three of these in the Affective Reasoning project. In the first part of this article we give a brief background on the Affective Reasoner, a collection of AI and multimedia programs currently being developed at DePaul University's Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence (after work originally done at Northwestern's The Institute for the Learning Sciences), and the ways the AR can be used to build intelligent agents with strong personalities. In the latter part of the article we discuss recent results using AR agents as virtual actors.





Clark Elliott
Fri Feb 28 20:34:25 EST 1997