Pascal Estraillier

Interactive educational games for autistic children with agent-based system

This article addresses design issues that are relevant in the Autism project which aims at developing a computer games, for diagnosis and training of the children with autism and accompanying mental disorders. This approach is put in the broader context of interactive environments, which computer games are a special case. The characteristic of our approach is that it has the capability of user adaptation. The user adaptation is based on the model they maintain the observation of user interactions, the knowledge of therapists and the case-based reasoning paradigm.

Supporting virtual enterprise systems using agent coordination

Open environments like the Internet or corporate intranets enable a large number of interested enterprises to access, filter, process and present information on an as-needed basis. These environments support modern applications, such as virtual enterprises and interorganisational workflow management systems, which involve a number of heterogeneous resources, services and processes. However, any execution of a virtual enterprise system would yield to disjoining and error-prone behaviour without appropriate techniques to coordinate the various business processes. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a flexible agent-based framework for supporting the coordination of virtual enterprises and workflow management systems. The paper also shows how an agent coordination infrastructure, which is explained by social constraints, can impact on the engineering of highly dynamic virtual enterprises and workflow management systems by presenting a simple case study.

Image complexity measure based on visual attention

Digital images can be analyzed at wide range of levels going from pixel arrangement to semantics. As a consequence, finding a visual complexity estimator is a difficult task. In this article we propose a definition of attention based perceptual complexity. We study the performance of human eye movements and of different models of computational attention against a ground-truth of image complexity based on the observation time of an image description task. The results obtained show that besides its lack of semantic processing, attentional behavior is a good estimator of image complexity.

Game execution control by analysis of player's behavior

Within the context of the games execution control, our objective is to define a model able to analyse the players behavior from heterogeneous data. It concerns events generated by the players actions. These events are the result of analysis of video stream (for gaze direction, head movement, etc.) and actions carried out on the controls elements (mouse click, entry selection, button, etc). The interest of such a model is the recognition of players behaviors in order to control the execution of the game. We have applied our research results to an interactive environment of educational games for autistic children.

Objective validation of a dynamical and plausible computational model of visual attention

Building a generic and highly capable vision system is still an open research problem. Actually, real-world vision systems need to face the challenge of dimensionality and ambiguity of data. To tackle this problem we introduced, in [1], a dynamic computational model of visual attention. This latter selects the most salient scene information while being able to adapt its behavior to the needs of a generic vision system. In this article, we focus on the objective validation of the plausibility of this original model. To check this property we compare (through three classical measures) the results obtained by several algorithms to an eye-tracking ground truth. Additionally, we study the influence of the model parameters on plausibility.

Real-time face tracking for attention aware adaptive games

This paper presents a real time face tracking and head pose estimation system which is included in an attention aware game framework. This fast tracking system enables the detection of the players attentional state using a simple attention model. This state is then used to adapt the game unfolding in order to enhance users experience (in the case of adventure game) and improve the game attentional attractiveness (in the case of pedagogical game).

Web 2.0 based e-learning: Moodle-openmeetings platform

While Web 2.0 technologies are beginning to have beneficial effects on trade, media and business in general, there are few papers describing the impact of technology on education. Currently, there are isolated cases of teachers who begin to explore the potential of blogs, sharing of media services, and other social software — which, even are not specifically designed for e-learning can be used to give teachers, tutors and learners the ability to create exciting new learning opportunities. Our approach is to continue to benefit from the traditional approach of E-learning by using the Moodle platform and at the same time encourage students to use Web 2.0 tools in their training in order to overcome the problem of isolation faced by learners in the remote training often leading to a high dropout rate due to some technical problems.

Adaptative execution of game: unfolding a correct story

Computer games have improved this last decade on technical aspects (graphical, sound design, etc.) as well as on the content. Actually games are getting more and more complex. Plot has been improved and is getting close to scenario movie or scenario novel.

A Situation-Based Multi-Agent Architecture for Handling Misunderstandings in Interactions

Abstract During interactions, system actors may face up misunderstandings when their local states contain inconsistent data about the same fact. Misunderstandings in interactions are likely to reduce interactivity performances (deviation or deadlock) or even affect overall system behavior. In this paper, we characterize misunderstandings in interactions between system actors (that may be human users or system agents) in interactive adaptive systems. To deal with such misunderstandings and ensure state consistency, we present an agent-based architecture and a scenario structuring approach. The system includes several agents devoted to scenario unfolding, plot adaptation and consistency management. Scenario structuring is based on the notion of a situation that is an elementary building block dividing the interactions between systems’ actors into contextual scenes. This pattern supports not only scenario execution but consistency management as well. In order to organize and control interactions, the situation contextualizes interactions and activity of the system’s actors. It also includes prevention and tolerance agent-based mechanisms to deal with the misunderstandings and their causes. We validate our consistency management mechanisms using Uppaal simulation and provide some experimental results to show the effectiveness of our approach on an online distance learning case study

Trace-based decision making in interactive application: Case of Tamagotchi systems

We present our exploratory work for situation preselecting in interactive applications, assuming that the application is an Interactive Adaptive System based on a sequence of contextualized “situations”. Each situation confines activities and interactions related to a common context, resources and system actors. When one situation is completed, the system has to determine which is the best following one. We introduce in this paper a new preselecting method that identifies possible next situations among all available situations. We propose a strategy using Naïve Bayes based on the analysis of the sets of available traces (the past of users). Combining all obtained results, we get a set of situations, called set of alternatives that can be used in any decision algorithm. We demonstrate our approach on a case study based on Tamagotchi game.