An agent that learns to support users of a Web site

The terms agent, intelligent agent and 3D agent are becoming more and more frequently used in literature. A key issue in the web community is that a web site must be equipped with a virtual agent able to support users in a natural way. Following this trend, we decided to implement scenographic agents mimic intelligent reasoning (SAMIR), a prototype of a tool for animating 3D intelligent agents, mainly founded on a genetic algorithms-based learning system, namely an XCS, and on an FFD-based technique for the facial deformation of the character. SAMIR is based on an object-oriented architecture, and it adopts the MPEG-4 facial animation parameters (FAPs) as a description format for facial expressions and animations. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.