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Special Topic: Embodied Conversational Agents

Required Readings (for all students)

  1. Cassell, J. (2001). Embodied Conversational Agents: Representation and Intelligence in User Interfaces. AI Magazine, 22(4), 67. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v22i4.1593
  2. Hartholt, Arno, David Traum, Stacy C. Marsella, Ari Shapiro, Giota Stratou, Anton Leuski, Louis-Philippe Morency, and Jonathan Gratch. All together now: Introducing the virtual human toolkit. In Intelligent Virtual Agents: 13th International Conference, IVA 2013, Edinburgh, UK, August 29-31, 2013. Proceedings 13, pp. 368-381. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013.
Required Readings(for presenter(s) and rapporteur(s))

  1. W.L. Johnson, J.W. Rickel, and J.C. Lester. Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 11:47-78, 2000
  2. Louwerse, Max M., Arthur C. Graesser, Danielle S. McNamara, and Shulan Lu. Embodied conversational agents as conversational partners. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 23, no. 9 (2009): 1244-1255.
  3. William Swartout, David Traum, Ron Artstein, Dan Noren, Paul Debevec, Kerry Bronnenkant, Josh Williams, Anton Leuski, Shrikanth S. Narayanan, Diane Piepol, Chad Lane, Jacquelyn Morie, Priti Aggarwal, Matt Liewer, Jen-Yuan Chiang, Jillian Gerten, Selina Chu and Kyle White, Ada and Grace: Toward Realistic and Engaging Virtual Museum Guides, in: In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2010
  4. Schroder, M., Bevacqua, E., Cowie, R., Eyben, F., Gunes, H., Heylen, D., Ter Maat, M., McKeown, G., Pammi, S., Pantic, M. and Pelachaud, C., 2011. Building autonomous sensitive artificial listeners. IEEE transactions on affective computing, 3(2), pp.165-183.
  5. David DeVault, Ron Artstein, Grace Benn, Teresa Dey, Ed Fast, Alesia Gainer, Kallirroi Georgila, Jon Gratch, Arno Hartholt, Margaux Lhommet, Gale Lucas, Stacy Marsella, Fabrizio Morbini, Angela Nazarian, Stefan Scherer, Giota Stratou, Apar Suri, David Traum, Rachel Wood, Yuyu Xu, Albert Rizzo, Louis-Philippe Morency SimSensei Kiosk: A Virtual Human Interviewer for Healthcare Decision Support In Proceedings of the 2014 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (pp. 1061-1068).
  6. Padmakumar, Aishwarya, Jesse Thomason, Ayush Shrivastava, Patrick Lange, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Spandana Gella, Robinson Piramuthu, Gokhan Tur, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. Teach: Task-driven embodied agents that chat. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 2017-2025. 2022.
  7. Mehdi Arjmand, Farnaz Nouraei, Ian Steenstra, and Timothy Bickmore. 2024. Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3652988.3673949

Other Readings
  1. André, Elisabeth, Rist, Thomas, Susanne van Mulken, Martin Klesen and Stephan Baldes: The Automated Design of Believable Dialogues for Animated Presentation Teams, in: J. Cassell, J. Sullivan, S. Prevost and E. Churchill: Embodied Conversational Agents, MIT Press, pp: 220-255, 2000.
  2. Jeff Rickel, Stacy Marsella, Jonathan Gratch, Randall Hill, David Traum, and William Swartout,  Towards a New Generation of Virtual Humans for Interactive Experiences, in IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17(4):32--38, 2002.
  3. Tim Bickmore, Justine Cassell Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents" In J. van Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjaer, and N. Bernsen (eds.),  Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction with Multimodal Dialogue Systems. New York: Kluwer Academic 2005
  4. S. Kopp, L. Gesellensetter, N. Krämer, I. Wachsmuth A conversational agent as museum guide -- design and evaluation of a real-world application. Ruth Aylett et al. (eds.): IVA 2005, International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, LNCS 3661, pp. 329-343, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2005.
  5. Boye, J., and Gustafson, J. (2005) How to do dialogue in a fairy-tale world, Proceedings of the sixth SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Lisabon, 2005
  6. André, E., & Pelachaud, C. (2010). Interacting with embodied conversational agents Speech technology: Theory and applications, 123-149.
  7. Traum, David, Priti Aggarwal, Ron Artstein, Susan Foutz, Jillian Gerten, Athanasios Katsamanis, Anton Leuski, Dan Noren, and William Swartout. Ada and Grace: Direct interaction with museum visitors. In Intelligent Virtual Agents: 12th International Conference, IVA 2012, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, September, 12-14, 2012. Proceedings 12, pp. 245-251. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012