[agents] PhD position in Human-Agent interaction

[Alexandre Pauchet]

*Title*: Natural interactions in mixed societies: towards systems made 
up of humans and autonomous virtual agents

*Supervisors*: Alexandre Pauchet and Julien Saunier

*Laboratory*: LITISlab, Normandy University - INSA Rouen (France)

*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***: _alexandre.pauchet at insa-rouen.fr_, 
_julien.saunier at insa-rouen.fr_

  * Curriculum vitae,
  * Transcripts from University
  * Brief description of why the applicant is interested in the PhD position
  * Contact information for two references

*Financial support*: national grant


      *Description:*

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: 
http://www.noldus.com/human-behavior-research/products/facereader), 
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: 
http://agent.roboslang.org/).

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.

-- 
Alexandre Pauchet
Associate Professor
INSA Rouen - ASI Department
LITIS Lab
Phone: +33(0)2 32 95 98 58
Web:http://asi.insa-rouen.fr/enseignants/~apauchet/