IRES: Avatar-based Adaptive Context System

中佛罗里达大学和位于德国伊尔曼瑙的弗劳恩霍夫数字媒体技术研究所（FIDMT）之间的跨学科合作关系专注于自适应对话虚拟形象，这是一个跨越计算机工程、计算机科学、教育、通信和社会科学的快速新兴领域。该研究领域的直接应用包括人工智能和国家安全（包括网络安全），交互式机器人，改善残疾人的生活质量，以及儿童和老人的健康和护理。该项目将安排中佛罗里达大学的学生在PI （A. J. Gonzalez博士）和德国伊尔梅瑙FIDMT的同行Klaus Jantke博士的指导下学习。Jantke博士是德国埃尔福特FIDMT儿童媒体部主任，在计算媒体研究方面有着悠久而辉煌的历史。创新和先进研究的国际方面在现代研究中至关重要，因此pi将与三组学生合作，在项目存在期间每年一组。每个队列将包括一名研究生和两名本科生（第一年）或四名本科生（随后每年）。每个队列的研究期将为16周——在资助期的每一年，在美国和德国分别进行8周和8周的研究。这个研究项目的动机是一种古老的讲故事的艺术。在我们对人工智能计算机代理的追求中，IRES项目寻求建立一种能力，可以自主地综合系统开发的可能场景，并根据监听者的请求动态地修改它们。更具体地说，这个项目的研究主题是创建一个基于虚拟形象的系统，可以根据用户的要求实时合成和适应一个场景，而不需要任何预先设定的路径。在中世纪，优秀的说书人很受重视，因为当时缺乏其他媒介来将故事讲述给大多数不识字的人。因此，该项目试图将讲故事的人体现在一个与真人相似的栩栩如生的化身中。这个虚拟角色会用自然语言向听众讲述故事，并在听众要求修改故事时与之互动。讲故事的媒体随着时间的推移而发展，从口头故事到现代电子书。随着计算机的发展，讲故事系统已经成为一门独立的科学，并且已经从只能生成一个短篇故事的简单系统进化为通过实时动态修改故事来响应听众的行为的系统。因此，数字叙事已经成为人工智能中一个不断发展的领域。该项目试图通过研究创造一个能讲述动态故事的虚拟说书人，将讲故事媒体的进化推进一步。这个故事可以根据听众（通常是孩子、学生或老人）的要求进行修改，但会力求保持现实和有趣。每个故事都有一个故事空间。也就是说，一个故事中只能发生这么多事情。我们使用上下文推理来表示故事空间。在现实世界中，行动过程受到当前情境的影响，当在故事空间中处理当前情境时，使一些会话角色非常吸引人，而另一些则不吸引人。同样地，主角在动态场景中所面对的情境也会限制他/她的行动选择，从而将故事带向不同的方向，而这些方向都不需要预先设定。pi的研究基于使用形式化方法来操纵故事主题内的故事空间。通过形式化方法，pi意味着一个人以字符串、交互序列（如故事板和图表）、公式（用于条件）等形式正式地表示故事知识。因此，形式方法将赋予在故事空间中使用形式方法（字符串比较、统一、反统一等）进行推理的能力。文献中已经使用了形式方法来处理上下文信息。

Part 1This interdisciplinary partnership between the University of Central Florida and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (FIDMT) in Ilmenau, Germany is focused on adaptive conversational avatars, the rapidly emerging field crossing computer engineering, computer science, education, communications, and social science. Immediate applications of this research field include artificial intellegence and national security (including cyber-security), interactive robotics, improvement of quality of life for disbaled, and health and caretaking for children and elderly.This project will place students from the University of Central Florida under the mentorship of the PI (Dr. A. J. Gonzalez) and of Dr. Klaus Jantke, the counterpart at FIDMT in Ilmenau, Germany. Dr. Jantke is the director of the Children's Media Department of FIDMT located in Erfurt, Germany and has a long and illustrious history in research in computing media. The international aspect of innovative and advanced research is essential in modern research hence the PIs will work with three cohorts of students, one during each year of the project's existence. Each cohort will include one graduate student and either two undergraduates (the first year) or four (in each of the subsequent years). The research period for each cohort will be 16 weeks - eight weeks in the US and eight weeks in Germany for each year of the grant period.This research project is motivated by an ancient art of storytelling. In our pursuit of an artificially intelligent computer agent, the IRES project seeks to build a capability to autonomously synthesize possible scenarios for the system development and to modify them dynamically upon listener request. More specifically, the topic of the research in this project is the creation of an avatar-based system that can synthesize and adapt a scenario according to the user's request in real time and without any pre-scripted pathways. Good storytellers were treasured in medieval times, given the lack of other media through which to relate a story to a mostly illiterate population. Therefore, the project seeks to embody the storyteller in a lifelike avatar that resembles an actual person. This avatar will tell the story to the listener in spoken natural language, and interact with her/him when the latter requests changes to the story. Part 2Storytelling media have evolved over time, from oral stories to modern E-books. Since the development of the computer, storytelling systems have become a science of their own, and have evolved from simple systems that can only generate a single short story to systems that respond to the listener's actions by modifying the story dynamically in real time. Digital storytelling has therefore become a growing field within artificial intelligence. The project seeks to take this evolution of storytelling media one step further by doing research to create a virtual storyteller who tells a dynamic story. The story is modifiable through a request by the listener (typically a child, a student, or an elderly person), yet will seek to remain realistic as well as interesting. Every story has a story space. That is, only so many things can happen in a story. We use contextual reasoning to represent the story space. In the real world, courses of action are influenced by the current context, making some conversational avatars very attractive while others unattractive when addressing the current situation within the story space. In a similar manner, the situation faced by the protagonist in the dynamic scenario will limit the choices of actions that he/she would otherwise have, thereby taking the story in various directions, none of which need be specifically pre-scripted. The PIs base the proposed research on the use of formal methods to manipulate the story space within the main theme of the story. By formal methods the PIs mean that one represents the story knowledge formally in terms of strings, interaction sequences such as storyboards and graphs, formulas (for conditions), and the like. Formal methods, therefore, will give the ability to reason with formal methods (string comparison, unification, anti-unification and the like) in the story space. Formal methods have been used in the literature to manipulate contextual information.