Jillian Gerten

Ada and grace: toward realistic and engaging virtual museum guides

To increase the interest and engagement of middle school students in science and technology, the InterFaces project has created virtual museum guides that are in use at the Museum of Science, Boston. The characters use natural language interaction and have near photoreal appearance to increase and presents reports from museum staff on visitor reaction.

Semi-formal Evaluation of Conversational Characters

Conversational dialogue systems cannot be evaluated in a fully formal manner, because dialogue is heavily dependent on context and current dialogue theory is not precise enough to specify a target output ahead of time. Instead, we evaluate dialogue systems in a semi-formal manner, using human judges to rate the coherence of a conversational character and correlating these judgments with measures extracted from within the system. We present a series of three evaluations of a single conversational character over the course of a year, demonstrating how this kind of evaluation helps bring about an improvement in overall dialogue coherence.

Ada and grace: direct interaction with museum visitors

We report on our efforts to prepare Ada and Grace, virtual guides in the Museum of Science, Boston, to interact directly with museum visitors, including children. We outline the challenges in extending the exhibit to support this usage, mostly relating to the processing of speech from a broad population, especially child speech. We also present the summative evaluation, showing success in all the intended impacts of the exhibit: that children ages 7–14 will increase their awareness of, engagement in, interest in, positive attitude about, and knowledge of computer science and technology.

FLoReS: A Forward Looking, Reward Seeking, Dialogue Manager

We present FLoReS, a new information-state-based dialogue manager, making use of forward inference, local dialogue structure, and plan operators representing subdialogue structure. The aim is to support both advanced, flexible, mixed initiative interaction and efficient policy creation by domain experts. The dialogue manager has been used for two characters in the SimCoach project and is currently being used in several related projects. We present the design of the dialogue manager and preliminary comparative evaluation with a previous system that uses a more conventional state chart dialogue manager.

Developing INOTS to support interpersonal skills practice

The Immersive Naval Officer Training System (INOTS) is a blended learning environment that merges traditional classroom instruction with a mixed reality training setting. INOTS supports the instruction, practice and assessment of interpersonal communication skills. The goal of INOTS is to provide a consistent training experience to supplement interpersonal skills instruction for Naval officer candidates without sacrificing trainee throughput and instructor control. We developed an instructional design from cognitive task analysis interviews with experts to serve as a framework for system development. We also leveraged commercial student response technology and research technologies including natural language recognition, virtual humans, realistic graphics, intelligent tutoring and automated instructor support tools. In this paper, we describe our methodologies for developing a blended learning environment, and our challenges adding mixed reality and virtual human technologies to a traditional classroom to support interpersonal skills training.1 2

Virtual Museum Guides demonstration

The Virtual Museum Guides [1] are two virtual humans set in an exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to promote interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The primary audience is children between ages 7 to 14, in particular females and other groups under-represented in STEM.