You are welcome to attend the following seminar.

Mr BECKER Christian (Universität Bielefeld, Germany) will present his doctoral research, and more precisely the *emotion simulation for a virtual human*. This work was partly carried out during a stay at NII under the supervision of Dr PRENDINGER Helmut (NII), sponsored by the JSPS.

Schedule: Wednesday 4th of April 2007 (15:00-16:00)
Location: National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), 19F, Room 1904
Language: English
Registration fees: None
Seminar page: http://horizons.free.fr/his/eng/seminars.htm

*Emotion Simulation for a Virtual Human: Implementing the "As-If"
Body-Loop in a Cognitive Architecture (15:00-16:00)*
by Mr BECKER Christian

Abstract:
In recent years, the integration of emotion-driven behaviors became prominent in the field of virtual humans. The virtual human under development at the University of Bielefeld, called Max, is a testbed for studying human-like behavior in natural face-to-face interactions. To endow its cognitive architecture with simulated emotions, we follow Damasio’s distinction of "primary" and "secondary" emotions. Primary ones are elicited as an immediate reaction to a stimulus that might originate from internal bodily processes; secondary ones (e.g. relief, hope) arise from cognitively higher processes of conscious appraisal. I will first introduce our agent's cognitive architecture and its employment in two different interaction scenarios. Then I will present
the psychological background for emotion simulation, distinguishing structural and dimensional emotion theories. Finally I will outline the implementation of an "as-if" body-loop, based on a distinction between physis and cognition in our architecture to simulate and express primary and secondary emotions.

Speaker:
Mr Becker received his M.S. degree from the University of Bielefeld, and is currently a Ph.D. student and research assistant in its Artificial Intelligence Group. Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), he stayed at the National Institute of Informatics during 3 month in 2005. His current research focuses on the simulation of complex emotions for conversational artifacts.

Website: http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~cbecker/index_engl.html