Browsing by Author "Santos, Pedro A."
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- EEG Mode: emotional episode generation for social sharing of emotionsPublication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.; Prada, RuiSocial sharing of emotions (SSE) occurs when one communicates their feelings and reactions to a certain event in the course of a social interaction. The phenomenon is part of our social fabric and plays an important role in creating empathetic responses and establishing rapport. Intelligent social agents capable of SSE will have a mechanism to create and build long-term interaction with humans. In this paper, we present the Emotional Episode Generation (EEG) model, a fine-tuned GPT-2 model capable of generating emotional social talk regarding multiple event tuples in a human-like manner. Human evaluation results show that the model successfully translates one or more event-tuples into emotional episodes, reaching quality levels close to human performance. Furthermore, the model clearly expresses one emotion in each episode as well as humans. To train this model we used a public dataset and built upon it using event extraction techniques(1).
- Emotionally expressive motion controller for virtual character locomotion animationsPublication . Silva, Diogo; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, JoaoStyle and emotional expressiveness are essential aspects of virtual character computer animation. For a virtual character to display different emotions, motion capture data conveying each desired style has to be recorded, even if the baseline motion is the same. Animators then have to refine and conjoin each recording in order to create the final animations making it a timely and costly process. Although there have been efforts made into the automatic generation of motions, the problem persists that, for each new desired emotion, reference data displaying said emotion has to be readily available and a new motion has to be learned from scratch. By combining Machine Learning with Emotion Analysis - in particular Laban Movement Analysis and the Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance Emotional State Model - we have developed a system that is capable of not only identifying the perceived emotion of locomotion animations but that also allows users to alter the character's expressed emotion in real time and without the need of additional data.
- FAtiMA toolkit: toward an accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agentsPublication . Mascarenhas, Samuel; Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Paiva, AnaMore than a decade has passed since the development of FearNot!, an application designed to help children deal with bullying through role-playing with virtual characters. It was also the application that led to the creation of FAtiMA, an affective agent architecture for creating autonomous characters that can evoke empathic responses. In this article, we describe the FAtiMA Toolkit, a collection of open-source tools that is designed to help researchers, game developers, and roboticists incorporate a computational model of emotion and decision-making in their work. The toolkit was developed with the goal of making FAtiMA more accessible, easier to incorporate into different projects, and more flexible in its capabilities for human-agent interaction, based upon the experience gathered over the years across different virtual environments and human-robot interaction scenarios. As a result, this work makes several different contributions to the field of Agent-Based Architectures. More precisely, the FAtiMA Toolkit’s library-based design allows developers to easily integrate it with other frameworks, its meta-cognitive model affords different internal reasoners and affective components, and its explicit dialogue structure gives control to the author even within highly complex scenarios. To demonstrate the use of the FAtiMA Toolkit, several different use cases where the toolkit was successfully applied are described and discussed.
- ISPO: a serious game to train the interview skills of police officersPublication . Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Soeiro, Cristina; Guerra, Raquel; Steiner-Stanitznig, Christina; Molinari, AndreaThe training of Police Interview competencies relies on the hiring of actors to play the role of victims, witnesses and suspects. While role-play can be a particularly effective training technique, it requires a significant amount of resources. The Interview Sim-ulation for Police Officers (ISPO) is a serious game developed as a collaboration of Gameware Europe with the Portuguese School of Police Officers. The objective of the game is to train police officers in communication competencies related to the interview of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Through ISPO, players can take the role of a police interviewer and practice the techniques and methodologies learned in theoretical classes. The serious game offers a safe, lightweight and easily repeatable experience. In order to evaluate the training effectiveness of the serious game, a study was con-ducted with 194 participants where general subjective learning effectiveness was mea-sured. Overall, the ISPO game improved the self-perceived competence of its players. Additionally, participants changed their opinion regarding the most valuable attitudes necessary to conduct a successful interview. Finally, the interaction with the game had a stronger effect on inexperienced users. These results lead us to believe that ISPO can be an added value to police officer schools.
- MHeVA - mental health virtual assistant for high education studentsPublication . Antunes, André; Guimarães, Manuel; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Boura, Carla; Campos, JoanaCurrent Higher Education Institutions' mental health support systems lack the capabilities to cope with the growing need and demand for mental health support from students. We introduce MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant - which was designed with the goal of creating an intelligent virtual agent that could serve as a first-line diagnostic-aid tool for mental health services across universities and faculties. Students interact with the agent which attempts to establish rapport and promotes disclosure through mental health state evaluation questions. In addition to this, MHeVA has the ability to assess self-reported anxiety levels, provide health improvement tips and flag the most severe cases. In order to evaluate the agent's effectiveness, a user study was conducted that measured self-disclosure, rapport building, anxiety levels and stigma mitigation. Our findings suggest that MHeVA was able to elicit self-disclosure in higher education students and achieved high levels of acceptance and engagement. The work presented further supports the potential benefits of using IVAs to encourage self-disclosure and to be integrated into existing mental health care systems.
- Prompting for socially intelligent agents with chatGPTPublication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Guimarães, Manuel; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.Socially Intelligent Agents (SIAs) have become increasingly popular in various contexts, including education and entertainment. However, creating complex social scenarios tailored to a designer's specific goals remains a significant challenge. The authoring burden can be substantial, limiting the potential of SIAs to deliver rich, engaging experiences. In this work, we propose leveraging the extensive knowledge stored within Large Language Models and use theory-driven prompting to extract social practices and identify appropriate social affordances for a scenario description. Our prompting approach aims to guide the system into considering the essential components (beliefs and desires) necessary to produce intentions, actions, and emotions(1). Results show that our approach produces large amounts of accurate and new information that can add value to the scenario. However, the process can introduce inaccuracies without human supervision.