Environmental product declarations (EPD) to EN 15804 provide information about the embodied carbon dioxide of construction products – their life cycle greenhouse gas emissions alongside reporting use renewable and non-renewable primary energy secondary fuels, among other environmental indicators. As number EPD increases, they become a useful data resource consider these impacts. In moving towar...

Embodied conversational agents are virtual characters that engage users in conversation with appropriate speech, gesture, and facial expression. The high cost of developing embodied conversational agents has led to a recent increase in open source agent platforms. In this paper, we present XNAgent, an open source platform for embodied conversational agents based on the XNA Framework. By leverag...

The paper introduces the concept of not-yet-embodied or self-transcending knowledge. The concept of self-transcending knowledge proposes a distinction between two types of tacit knowledge: tacit-embodied knowledge on the one hand and not-yet-embodied knowledge on the other hand. The distinction is relevant because each of the three forms of knowledge--explicit, tacit-embodied, and self-transcen...

We present a framework for designing cheap control architectures of embodied agents. Our derivation is guided by the classical problem of universal approximation, whereby we explore the possibility of exploiting the agent's embodiment for a new and more efficient universal approximation of behaviors generated by sensorimotor control. This embodied universal approximation is compared with the cl...

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on m...

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) offer platforms for the collection of structured interaction and communication data. This paper discusses the data collected from the Rachel system, an ECA developed at the University of Southern California, for interactions with children with autism. Two dyads each composed of a child with autism and his parent participated in an experiment with two modes: ...

We have enhanced a computational cognitive agent by embodying it with real and simulated bodies operating in real and simulated worlds. This has allowed us to experiment with various ways that embodiment influences the creation and meaning of the agent’s beliefs and other terms in its knowledge base, including: symbol-grounding by perception and action; firstperson privileged knowledge; the rep...

In this paper we test the dominant paradigm for modeling the semantics of determined noun phrases called Generalized Quantifier Theory in embodied interactions with robots. We contrast the traditional approach with a new approach, called Clustering Determination, which is heavily inspired by research on grounding of sensorimotor categories, and we show that our approach performs better in noisy...

What does creativity produce? A concept is ‘a mental representation of a class of things’ Murphy (2002, p.5), and concepts are the primary output of a creative process. In other words, creativity is the process in which a creative agent recognises a new kind of thing, or modifies their understanding of a kind of thing, changing their view of the world in some valuable way. The visible output of...

The major theories of presence in virtual worlds (social presence, co-presence, self-presence, hyper presence, and external presence) all define presence as an illusion about the virtual-ness of a virtual experience (Schultze, 2010). Their approach implies that we are always present when there is no virtuality. In this essay I will argue that 1) regardless of virtuality, we are almost never pre...