University of Bari

Department of Informatics

Intelligent Interfaces


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A tool to simulate cognitive activation of mixed emotions in artificial agents





Objective

The purpose of this tools is to simulate cognitive activation of emotions in artificial agents, as a consequence of 'endogenous' or 'exogenous' events.
Personality and context-dependent activation of mixed emotions and their time decay are simulated with dynamic belief networks. The output may be presented in tabular or graphical form (as in the figure) or may be 'pronounced' by an Embodied Animated Agent (see next figure).




Participants

Valeria Carofiglio
Giuseppe Clarizio
Fiorella de Rosis
Giuseppe Roberto Grassano

Architecture and Language

Updating of dynamic belief networks was implemented with Hugin's APIs.
Agents were implemented with PeoplePutty, distribuited by Haptek, and the Microsoft TTS.
The graphical interface was implemented in C++.

Publications
  • V.Carofiglio and F. de Rosis:
    In favour of cognitive models of emotions.
    Workshop on "Mind-Minding Agents" at AISB'05.
    Hatfield, April 2005
  • V. Carofiglio, F. de Rosis and R. Grassano:
    Dynamic models of mixed emotion activation.
    In D. Canamero and R Aylett (Eds): "Animating expressive characters for social interactions".
    John Benjamins, in press.

    • How it works

    As a first step, the simulation conditions have to be settled with icons in the menu-bar: the agent's personality (as a combination of weights given to its goals), a 'social context', a 'threshold' for emotion activation and a domain.
    Events are then introduced at every time slice, and the related evidence is propagated in the network by clicking on a icon.
    The updated emotional state of the artificial agent is displayed on the left-side, bottom window.
    In the 'agent display' mode, affect tags are automatically added to the input string of the agent's player, so as to get the agent to pronounce it with the activated emotion mixture.



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