[agents] PhD position in Multiparty Interaction at LITIS - INSA Rouen Normandy

[alexandre.pauchet at insa-rouen.fr]

*Title*: Natural Interactions in Mixed societies: towards societies 
populated by humans and autonomous agents*
*

*Supervisors*: Alexandre Pauchet et Julien Saunier*
*

*Laboratory*: LITIS, Normandy University - INSA Rouen Normandy *
*

*Profile*: Master’s degree in Computer Sciences with knowledge in

  * Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems,
  * Human-Machine Interaction (virtual reality, augmented reality and/or
    robotics),
  * Machine-Learning, Data-Mining, NLP and more generally AI

*Application*: email to alexandre.pauchet at insa-rouen.fr and 
julien.saunier at insa-rouen.fr

  * Resume,
  * Transcripts,
  * Recommendation letters
  * Application letter

*Description*:

With the expansion of connected objects, ubiquitous computing, and 
intuitive and natural human-machine interfaces, mixed communities 
(software agents and humans in interaction) are democratizing. Whereas 
there exists an abundant literature about interaction with a single 
user, multiparty interactions remain under investigated. This PhD aims 
to study the theoretical and practical ways to allow interaction between 
[1..N] virtual agents and [0..M] humans (with n+m> 2). The main idea is 
to define multimodal and affective interaction protocols that enables 
interaction to be similar between software agents (virtual agents and/or 
robots) and between humans and agents, mixed communities. The 
interaction protocols could be learned or extracted from human-human or 
human-agents interaction.

A first approach to the subject would be to create a system (funded on 
e.g. https://agent.roboslang.org) whose interaction model focuses on the 
choice of the multimodal communicative acts and not on the animations 
played by the agents (robots and virtual agents). The agents will 
autonomously choose the corresponding animations, depending on the 
dialogue states and the other participants in the interaction (humans or 
agents).

Practical applications for this PhD are:

  * Multi-party dialogue protocols in tutoring virtual environments,
  * Robotic assistance and companioning,
  * Emotional contagion in mixed communities,
  * Multi-party interactive narration.

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cs.umbc.edu/pipermail/agents/attachments/20190416/42c2431b/attachment.html>