Annotated Bibliography

Human Agent/Avatar Resources

This list is largely adapted from a list I found by the folks from the Oz project (see 'lists maintained by others' below). I have gone through and fixed broken links, deleted some, and added many others. I'm in the process of figuring out a good way to categorize the entries.

Center for the Study of Language and Information

Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves, in the Social Responses to Communication Technology project (part of the Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information) have demonstrated that human interactions with machines are inherently, and unavoidably social. We respond to computers as if they were human, and user interface designers can not afford to ignore the social and emotional aspects of that interaction.

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory:

MERL was founded in January 1991 as Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation of Japan. MERL's charter is to conduct problem-driven basic research in computers and their uses. In our view, this means exploring entirely new categories of possibility rather than merely making incremental improvements to what is now possible. By solving fundamental problems that arise in expanding the productive use of computers, we hope to contribute to the advancement of science and society as a whole.

Persona Project at Microsoft Research

The Persona project at Microsoft Research is developing the technologies required to produce conversational assistants-- lifelike animated characters that interact with a user in a natural spoken dialog. Their first prototype is Peedy, a character that responds to requests to play music. Gene Ball, a researcher in the Persona Project, organizes the conference Lifelike Computer Characters.

Contact Consortium

A group that promotes avatar spaces.

Center for Human Modeling and Simulation (University of Pennsylvania)

Home of Jack, a graphical human simulation package. The research at the Center is focused around building behavior and physics-based simulations of human figures.

Center for Human Computer Communication

The Center for Human-Computer Communication is a research center at OGI within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. We are a multidisciplinary group, including computer scientists, psychologists, and linguists.

Computer Graphics Lab

Lab group headed by Daniel Thalmann, with research oriented towards the Virtual Worlds especially the simulation of realtime virtual humans.

The Cog Shop (MIT AI Lab)

Led by Rodney Brooks, the father of subsumption architecture. Rodney has been arguing for over a decade that the road to intelligence consists of building situated, embodied, broad agents (in his case, robots) which employ no semantic representations. Cog is a humanoid robot. As Cog interacts with the world using a body similar to a human body, it is hoped that Cog will learn to think the way humans do.

Gesture and Narrative Language (MIT Media Lab)

Led by Justine Cassell. Using ideas from discourse theory and social cognition, this group designs agents which have discourse competence (e.g. knowing how to integrate gestures and speech to communicate, knowing how to take turns in a conversation, etc.).

IMPROV Project (NYU Media Research Lab)

This project is led by Ken Perlin and Athomas Goldberg . "The IMPROV Project at NYU's Media Research Lab is building the technologies to produce distributed 3D virtual environments in which human-directed avatars and computer-controlled agents interact with each other in real-time, through a combination of Procedural Animation and Behavioral Scripting techniques developed in-house." An example of convergence towards believable characters from the graphics side (vs. AI).

IntelliMedia

North Carolina State University

Led by James Lester. This group focuses on intelligent multimedia. Currently they are focusing on animated pedagogical agents.

MIRALab (University of Geneva)

Led by Nadia Thalmann. This group works on virtual humanoids. Focus is on realistic modeling of human faces, movement, clothing, etc. Now starting to do work on autonomous systems.

Oz Project (Carnegie Mellon University)

Led by Joseph Bates, founder of Zooesis. The goal of the Oz project is to build interactive story worlds containing personality rich, believable characters. A drama manager ensures that the user experiences a high-quality story.

Percpetual Science Lab

The Perceptual Science Laboratory (Dominic Massaro, Michael Cohen) is engaged in a variety of experimental and theoretical inquiries in perception and cognition. A major research area concerns speech perception by ear and eye, and facial animation. This is also the home of Baldi (here's a link to download software).

Software Agent Group (MIT Media Lab)

Led by Patti Maes. The software agent group explores the use of autonomous agents in a wide variety of contexts. Much of their work tends to have an artificial life flavor (by which I mean that the work focuses on useful behavior emerging out of the interactions of many software agents). Agents as synthetic characters was explored by Bruce Blumberg in the ALIVE and Hamsterdam projects. The synthetic character work has how shifted to a new group being started by Bruce. He developed an ethologically motivated action selection mechanism to drive his synthetic characters.

Sony Computer Science Lab

Akikazu Takeuchi at the Sony Computer Science Lab, has developed a situated agent that utilizes speech recognition and synthesis, and a simulated human face. (based on DECface).

Virtual Environments for Training (USC Information Sciences Institute)

Led by W. Lewis Johnson. This group has built a pedagogic agent named Steve that trains humans in virtual worlds. Steve teaches people how to perform tasks, gives advice as it watches users perform tasks, and answers student's questions.

Virtual Theater Project (Stanford)

Led by Barbara Hayes-Roth, founder of Extempo. The metaphor informing their work is that of an improvisational actor. That is, they build actors who try to improvise behavior in different situations. An actor's improvisational choices may be influenced by an explicitly specified personality (a set of values along some dimensions of personality). They are also exploring how a human might exert high level control over one of these actors.

Waseda Humanoid Project (Waseda University)

They are building a humanoid robot including sensing, recognition, expression and motion subsystems.

LISTS MAINTAINED BY OTHERS

Characters, improvisation, and ...A collection of links maintained by Craig Reynolds, famous for his creation of Boids, an artificial life simulation of flocking birds in which each bird's behavior is determined only by local rules. The collection is organized into the following categories: Characters, Creativity, Physically-Based Animated Figures, Games, Participatory Ecosystems, Robots, Agents, and Multi-Agent Systems.

Katherine Isbister and Terre Layton at Sunsoft have created a bibliography of work on intelligent agents.

Perception Science Lab (PSL) maintained list of computer graphics and facial animation links.

Norman Badler's link to virtual human resources.

Haskin's Laboratory link to virtual human resources.