Yilin Kang

Towards intelligent caring agents for Aging-In-Place: Issues and challenges

The aging of the worlds population presents vast societal and individual challenges. The relatively shrinking workforce to support the growing population of the elderly leads to a rapidly increasing amount of technological innovations in the field of elderly care. In this paper, we present an integrated framework consisting of various intelligent agents with their own expertise and responsibilities working in a holistic manner to assist, care, and accompany the elderly around the clock in the home environment. To support the independence of the elderly for Aging-In-Place (AIP), the intelligent agents must well understand the elderly, be fully aware of the home environment, possess high-level reasoning and learning capabilities, and provide appropriate tender care in the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social aspects. The intelligent agents sense in non-intrusive ways from different sources and provide wellness monitoring, recommendations, and services across diverse platforms and locations. They collaborate together and interact with the elderly in a natural and holistic manner to provide all-around tender care reactively and proactively. We present our implementation of the collaboration framework with a number of realized functionalities of the intelligent agents, highlighting its feasibility and importance in addressing various challenges in AIP.

Self-organizing Cognitive Models for Virtual Agents

Three key requirements of realistic characters or agents in virtual world can be identified as autonomy, interactivity, and personification. Working towards these challenges, this paper proposes a brain inspired agent architecture that integrates goal-directed autonomy, natural language interaction and human-like personification. Based on self-organizing neural models, the agent architecture maintains explicit mental representation of desires, intention, personalities, self-awareness, situation awareness and user awareness. Autonomous behaviors are generated via evaluating the current situation with active goals and learning the most appropriate social or goal-directed rule from the available knowledge, in accordance with the personality of each individual agent. We have built and deployed realistic agents in an interactive 3D virtual environment. Through an empirical user study, the results show that the agents are able to exhibit realistic human-like behavior, in terms of actions and interaction with the users, and are able to improve user experience in virtual environment.

Agent-Based Virtual Humans in Co-Space: An Evaluative Study

Co-Space refers to interactive virtual environment modelled after the real world in terms of look-and-feel, functionalities and services. We have developed a 3D virtual world named Nan yang Technological University (NTU) Co-Space populated with virtual human characters. Three key requirements of realistic virtual humans in the virtual world have been identified, namely (1) autonomy: agents can function on their own, (2) interactivity: agents can interact naturally with players, and (3) personality: agents can exhibit human traits and characteristics. Working towards these challenges, we propose a brain-inspired agent architecture that integrates goal-directed autonomy, natural language interaction and human-like personality. We conducted an evaluative study involving human subjects to assess how virtual characters may enhance user experience in the virtual world. The results show that the fusion ART-based virtual humans receive significantly higher ratings in various performance measures related to user experience, especially Telepresence, Perceived Interactivity and Flow.

Silver Assistants for Aging-in-Place

In this demo, we present an assembly of silver assistants for supporting Aging-In-Place (AIP). The virtual agents are designed to serve around the clock to complement human care within the intelligent home environment. Residing in different platforms with ubiquitous access, the agents collaboratively provide holistic care to the elderly users. The demonstration is shown in a 3-D virtual home replicating a typical 5-room apartment in Singapore. Sensory inputs are stored in a knowledge base named Situation Awareness Model (SAM). Therefore, the capabilities of the agents can always be extended by expanding the knowledge defined in SAM. Using the simulation system, we can rapidly conduct various types of experiments to test and evaluate whether the silver assistants have effectively and reliably fulfilled their duties when serving the elderly.

Self-organizing agents for reinforcement learning in virtual worlds

We present a self-organizing neural model for creating intelligent learning agents in virtual worlds. As agents in a virtual world roam, interact and socialize with users and other agents as in real world without explicit goals and teachers, learning in virtual world presents many challenges not found in typical machine learning benchmarks. In this paper, we highlight the unique issues and challenges of building learning agents in virtual world using reinforcement learning. Specifically, a self-organizing neural model, named TD-FALCON (Temporal Difference - Fusion Architecture for Learning and Cognition), is deployed, which enables an autonomous agent to adapt and function in a dynamic environment with immediate as well as delayed evaluative feedback signals. We have implemented and evaluated TD-FALCON agents as virtual tour guides in a virtual world environment. Our experimental results show that the agents are able to adapt and improve their performance in real time. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the few in-depth works on building complete learning agents that adapt their behaviors through real time reinforcement learning in virtual world.

Agent-augmented co-space: toward merging of real world and cyberspace

Co-Space refers to interactive virtual environment modelled after the real world we are situated in. Through realistic 3D modelling and animation technologies, Co-Space simulates the real world in terms of look-and-feel of our physical surrounding. With the advancement in pervasive sensor network, Co-Space may also capture and mirror the happening in the physical world in real time. The development of Co-Space thus offers great opportunities for delivering innovative applications and services. Specifically, for enriching the experience of users in Co-Space, it is essential to incorporate knowledge facilities in the form of intelligent agents to enhance the interactivity and playability within. This paper will begin with a brief review of this emerging field of work related to agents in virtual worlds and integrated cognitive architectures. We then discuss the key requirement, issues and challenges in making Co-Space interactive and intelligent. Following the notion of embodied intelligence, we propose to develop cognitive agents, based on a family of self-organizing neural models, known as fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory (fusion ART). Our ultimate aim is to have such agents roaming freely in the landscape of Co-Space, developing an awareness of its surrounding and interacting with avatars of real human. As an illustration, a case study of our effort in building the Singapore Youth Olympic Village (YOV) Co-Space will be presented.

Youth Olympic Village Co-space

We have designed and implemented a 3D virtual world based on the Co-Space concept encompasses the Youth Olympic Village (YOV) and several sports competition venues. It is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) virtual world built according to the actual, physical locations of the YOV and sports competition venues. On top of that, the Co-Space is being populated with human-like avatars, which are created according to the actual human size and appearance, they perform their activities and interact with the users in real-world context. In addition, autonomous intelligent agents are integrated into the Co-Space to provide context-aware and personalized services to the users. These agents, which are in the form of human-like avatars, act as the users’ personal tour guides, they interact with the users and gradually learn the users’ preferences. Then, the agents are able to suggest suitable locations for the users to visit. The intention of deploying these agents is to enrich the Co-Space with a variety of interactions tailored to each user’s preferences instead of the same contents for everyone. Besides, our Co-Space also provides an avenue for people from different locations throughout the world to explore the YOV and experience the atmosphere of the sports events in Singapore.