Virtual Clone-contribution

Student Virtual Clone (SVC) is more one internacional project we participate. At this moment it is on submittion fase and I try to specify my contribution on this project to use in advantage my thesis work. I will direct my contribution on pattern recognition of the prosodic and gestual inputs to generate emotional behaviors on computer character. Follow some detailed description I have made about what can I do on this project:

Our company contribution within the Virtual Clone Project WP Dialogue will be focused on the pattern recognition tasks oriented to study and development of algorithms for emotional behaviour controlling. Using our know-how on the artificial intelligence field and applying state of the art of pattern recognition, emotional intelligence and artificial life tasks, we will provide analysis of important tasks to make virtual being emotionally intelligent. We also will provide research of what is emotions on artificial life concept, how we can integrate it on virtual clone, how we can configure it and how it can be useful.

At this point, it is important to emphasize that we will be working over a research and algorithm conception of emotion behaviours. Consequently, we will research the best way to integrate emotions on virtual clone, what it involves and how it can be implemented.

Vision and Goals
What we want is to research how emotions are used on artificial beings like robots or 3D characters. What kind of emotions is useful and how we can analyse inputs to transmit correct idea to the end user. We will analyse possible interactions between user and virtual clone, possible feedback of the system, and define emotional responses of the virtual clone. Based on this research made in collaboration with other partners we will specify the best configuration for input data.

It will be necessary to proceed with the analysis of certain emotional patterns: classify them, specify requirement for dataset, create dataset, discover the best data-mining technique for pattern recognition task and implement this method (for example, neural net, bayesian net, decision tree, etc...). Important task is to define structure of the dataset and then make data analysis and treatment to prevent noise, over-fitting, and to increase data quality. We need to analyze all components of our dataset using different statistic techniques. After conclusion of the pattern recognition analysis it will be necessary to integrate these results on the SVC simulation. We will implement algorithms to generate all necessary behaviour output that will be included on graphic and prosodic modules. The link between graphic and prosodic modules and behaviour returning algorithm will be implemented by each responsible of these modules.

Major problem is to get adequate feedback to most part of interaction between human and his virtual clone. For example: if user talk to clone with anger system identifies anger behaviour and clone receive content of the user speech and information about user emotional state. What algorithm will decide clone emotional response to the user? We will research this task to find the technique defining most adequate response of the clone.

Another important point we will have to be aware is about personalization of each virtual clone. User should have the possibility to parameterize some personal characteristic to make the virtual character a confident virtual companion. For this we think about creating some visual interface to simplify emotion parameterization. We will study and develop the concept of this visual interface.

Finally, we will try as much as possible to spread the use of open solutions in order to facilitate the interoperability and extensibility of the system. All research and development must satisfy requirements to be reusable for other projects involving emotional intelligence and virtual or robotic agents.