An Architecture for Intelligent Affective Agents

2015

Affective characteristics are crucial factors that influence human behavior, and often the prevalence of either emotions or reason varies on each individual. We aim to facilitate the development of agents that simulate humans' reasoning in equilibrium with their affective characteristics. We first identify core processes in an affective BDI agent, and we integrate them into an agent architecture (GenIA 3). These tasks include the extension of the BDI agent reasoning cycle to be compliant with the architecture, and the extension of the agent language (Jason) to support affection-based reasoning, as well as the parametrization of the affectionrationality equilibrium.

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology

Affective characteristics are crucial factors that influence human behavior, and often, the prevalence of either emotions or reason varies on each individual. We aim to facilitate the development of agents’ reasoning considering their affective characteristics. We first identify core processes in an affective BDI agent, and we integrate them into an affective agent architecture ( GenIA 3 ). These tasks include the extension of the BDI agent reasoning cycle to be compliant with the architecture, the extension of the agent language (Jason) to support affect-based reasoning, and the adjustment of the equilibrium between the agent’s affective and rational sides.

Proceedings of the Twelfth …, 2005

Procedia Computer Science, 2017

The paper describes and discusses processes needed for human emotional behaviour simulation, in particular, emotion incorporation into rational thinking, as well as presents corresponding agent architecture. Such system would enable various application fields, perhaps one of the most important being enhancing smart devices with emotions. Decreasing frequency of social contact has become an urgent issue, particularly among young people. Emotional and social intelligence are however highly desired set of skills which is impossible to develop without interacting with others. Although this problem has been acknowledged, and there are some efforts to facilitate social contact, e.g., by augmented virtual reality games, that is still not enough. There is a need to develop environment that would allow learning exactly social and emotional skills. This ongoing research aims at developing intelligent agents that are able to express and incorporate affects into rational processes.

2014

Recently an increasing amount of research focuses on improving agents believability by adding affective features to the traditional agent-based modeling. This is probably due to the demand of reaching ever more realistic behaviors on agent-based simulations which extends to several and diverse application fields. The present work proposes O3A: an Open Affective Agent Architecture, which extends a traditional BDI agent architecture improving a practical reasoning with more "human" characteristics. This architecture tries to address disperse definitions combining the main elements of supporting psychological and neurological theories.

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2008

This paper attempts to highlight some of the research that has been conducted worldwide in the area of computational models of emotions, with a particular emphasis on agent emotions suitable for simulations and games. The intended outcome is to both review some of the more prominent research in the field, and to also ascertain the level of formal psychology that may underpin such work with a view to proposing that there is scope for an architecture built from the ground up, that arises from non-conflicting theories of emotion.

Information and Software Technology, 2007

This paper proposes modeling of artificial emotions through agents based on symbolic approach. The symbolic approach utilizes symbolic emotional rule-based systems (rule base that generated emotions) with continuous interactions with environment and an internal ''thinking'' machinery that comes as a result of series of inferences, evaluation, evolution processes, adaptation, learning, and emotions. We build two models for agent based systems; one is supported with artificial emotions and the other one without emotions. We use both in solving a bench mark problem; ''The Orphanage Care Problem''. The two systems are simulated and results are compared. Our study shows that systems with proper model of emotions can perform in many cases better than systems without emotions. We try to shed the light here on how artificial emotions can be modeled in a simple rule-based agent systems and if emotions as they exist in ''real intelligence'' can be helpful for ''artificial intelligence''. Agent architectures are presented as a generic blueprint on which the design of agents can be based. Our focus is on the functional design, including flow of information and control. With this information provided, the generic blueprints of architectures should not be difficult to implement agents, thus putting these theoretical models into practice. We build the agents using this architecture, and many experiments and analysis are shown.

Cybernetics and Systems, 2001

We present a preliminary definition and a theory of emotion viewed as a sequential process comprising the appraisal of the agent global state, the generation of an emotion-signal and an emotion-response. This theory distinguishes cognitive from affective appraisal on an architecture-grounded basis. A scheme for emotion classification with five dimensions is presented. Among them, we emphasize the roles played by emotions and the way these roles are fulfilled. It is shown how emotions are generated, represented and used in the Salt & Pepper architecture for autonomous agents [Botelho 1997]: emotion-signals, represented by label, valence and intensity, are generated by the affective engine through the appraisal of the agent's global state; for each emotion-signal there are several nodes stored and interconnected in the behavioral or in the cognitive networks of the agent; each of these nodes contains an emotion response that may be executed when an emotion-signal is generated; emotion intensity relates to the activation of the node. The implementation of a concrete example is fully described.

The addition of emotions may be the key to producing rational behavior in autonomous agents. For situated agents, a different perspective on learning is proposed which relies on the agent's ability to react in an emotional way to its dynamically changing environment. Here an architecture of mind is presented with the ability to display adaptive emotional states of varying types and intensities, and an implementation, "Conscious" Mattie (CMattie), of this architecture is discussed. Using this architecture, CMattie will be able to interact with her environment in a way that includes emotional content at a basic level. In addition she will learn more complex emotions which will enable her to react to her situation in a more complex manner. A general description is given of the emotional mechanisms of the architecture and its effects on learning are explained.

Computer Science and Information Systems, 2015

last decade, intensive research on emotional intelligence has advanced significantly from its theoretical basis, analytical studies and processing technology to exploratory applications in a wide range of real-life domains. This paper brings new insights in the field of emotional, intelligent software agents. The first part is devoted to an overview of the state-of-the-art in emotional intelligence research with emphasis on emotional agents. A wide range of applications in different areas like modeling emotional agents, aspects of learning in emotional environments, interactive emotional systems and so on are presented. After that we suggest a systematic order of research steps with the idea of proposing an adequate framework for several possible real-life applications of emotional agents. We recognize that it is necessary to apply specific methods for dynamic data analysis in order to identify and discover new knowledge from available emotional information and data sets. The last p...