Basing artificial emotion on process and resource management

Proc. of the Doctoral Consortium at ACII2007, Lisbon, …, 2007

Dramatic story-worlds require software agents with emotional competences. I propose as building blocks for a computational model of emotion explicitly bounded resources and concurrently active processes acquiring and using the resources. A set of objectives for the implementation of such a model is presented based on limitations identified in earlier approaches towards the same goal. The proposed method for achieving these objectives involves incremental modelling of a growing collection of emotional episodes, with a clear delineation of technically necessary simplifications.

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.

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. In this context, computational modelling of emotion is a major challenge in order to design believable virtual humans. This factor has an impact on both the individual behaviour and the collective one. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the emotion contagion phenomenon in order to model emerging group behaviour.

With virtual agents becoming more and more common in everyday life it is very important to define and develop agents with social capabilities. One of the most important social ability for effective social interaction with people is the capacity to understand, feel and ultimately express emotions . In this paper we propose an architecture, based on the BDI paradigm , employing the three layered approach (i.e. reactive, schematic or behavioral and conceptual). We have added an emotion engine to simulate the generation of affective states based on Scherer's component process theory and on previous works from Lisetti et al. . We describe the guidelines which facilitate the development of such an architecture and present its behaviors in some simple scenarios to show the different level of the reasoning (i.e. reactive, schematic or behavioral and conceptual) and their interaction within an emotional context.

2001

Emotions play a critical role in creating engaging and believable characters to populate virtual worlds. Our goal is to create general computational models to support characters that act in virtual environments, make decisions, but whose behavior also suggests an underlying emotional current. In service of this goal, we integrate two complementary approaches to emotional modeling into a single unified system. Gratch's Émile system focuses on the problem of emotional appraisal: how emotions arise from an evaluation of how environmental events relate to an agent's plans and goals. Marsella et al.'s IPD system focuses more on the impact of emotions on behavior, including the impact on the physical expressions of emotional state through suitable choice of gestures and body language. This integrated model is layered atop Steve, a pedagogical agent architecture, and exercised within the context of the Mission Rehearsal Exercise, a prototype system designed to teach decision-making skills in highly evocative situations.

2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, 2011

Existing computational models of emotions, although based on different psychological theories, share common properties and may be seen as the different facets of a common emotional process. We thus present our model GRACE-aiming at unifying existing models into a single architecture while preserving the peculiarities of each of them. We also demonstrate the generality of GRACE in emulating the behavior of these existing models.

In this paper we describe our work in progress for exploring the role of emotions in the behaviour and decision-making of artificial agents in modeling and simulation systems. The computational model of emotions we are using is based on a multi-level theory of emotions that accounts for the three layers identified in the human emotional system: the sensory-motor level, the schematic level and the conceptual level. Our current interest lies in modeling and simulating the impact of emotions in the workplace, both at the individual and at the group level. We are working to incorporate our model of emotions into Brahms, a multi-level modeling and simulation system being developed at NASA Ames Research Center.

2001

Abstract Emotions play a critical role in creating engaging and believable characters to populate virtual worlds. Our goal is to create general computational models to support characters that act in virtual environments, make decisions, but whose behavior also suggests an underlying emotional current. In service of this goal, we integrate two complementary approaches to emotional modeling into a single unified system.

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.

2008