In this paper, we translate a model of value-based emo- tional agents into an architecture for narrative characters and we validate it in a narrative scenario. The advantage of using such model is that different moral behaviors can be obtained as a consequence of the emotional ap- praisal of moral values, a desirable feature for digital storytelling techniques.

AI research in interactive narrative often lacks specificity as to the player experience it is trying to enable. In this paper, we consider a set of desirable elements from narrative and interactive experiences, and show by looking at playable experiences from industry and academia that combining them has the potential to be limited or self-defeating. To address these issues, we propose opportunistic storytelling , a set of design principles for near-term playable interactive narratives.

Psychologists and social scientists have been researching creativity in humans for several years, and it has gained the attention of artificial intelligence and robotics researchers as well. In this abstract, we discuss the emotional and conversational interface required for a humanoid robot to socially interact with children in order to learn new creative concepts. We briefly describe the approach we are taking to develop such a humanoid robot that can collaborate with children to discover creative concepts.

The agent is "always on," i.e. it is continuously available and aware (using a camera and infrared motion sensor) when the user is in its presence and can initiate interaction with the user, rather than requiring the user login to begin interaction. We expect that the agent will help reduce the user's isolation not just by always being around but also by specific activities that connect the user with friends, family and the local community. Our goal is for the agent to be a natural, humanlike presence that "resides" in the user's apartment. Beginning in the late summer of 2014, we will be placing our agents with users for a monthlong evaluation study. Figure 1: Virtual agent interface -- "Karen" Three issues of our project directly concern the topics of this workshop are: (1) the embodiment of the agent, (2) the engagement behaviors that are associated with being "always measures we will be using are questionnaires that assess the on," and (3) AI tools for support intelligent behavior.

In this work, we focus on advancing the state of the art in intelligent agents that can learn complex procedural tasks from humans. Our main innovation is to view the interaction between the human and the robot as a mixed- initiative collaboration. Our contribution is to integrate hierarchical task networks and collaborative discourse theory into the learning from demonstration paradigm to enable robots to learn complex tasks in collaboration with the human teacher.

In this paper we explain how IETAL agents learn their environment, and how they build their intrinsic, internal representation of it, which they then use to build their expectations when on quest to satisfy its active drives. As environments change (with or without other agents present in them), the agents learn to new and “forget” irrelevant, “old” associations made. We discuss the concept of emotional context of associations, and show a gallery of simulations of behaviors in small multiagent societies.

We present a system that produces emotionally rich poetry inspired by personalized and empathic interpretation of text, particularly Internet blogs. Our implemented system is based on the blackboard architecture, and generates poetry from a theme that it considers the most inspiring. It also incorporates a model of emotions with an individual optimism rate that defines an affective state. The poems produced by the system contain emotional expressions that describe these feelings. We explain how the system re-conceptualizes the text by the empathic interpretation of its content. We also present how the blackboard architecture may support divergent problem solving in the field of computational creativity.We describe the system architecture and the generation algorithm followed by some illustrative results. Finally, we mention possible continuation of this work by incorporating other language generating systems as well as human experts in the blackboard architecture.

An agent continuously performing different tasks in the same domain has the opportunity to learn, over the course of its operational lifetime, about the behavioural regularities afforded by the domain. This paper addresses the problem of learning a task independent behaviour model based on the underlying structure of a domain which is common across multiple tasks presented to an autonomous agent. Our approach involves learning action priors: a behavioural model which encodes a notion of local common sense behaviours in the domain, conditioned on either the state or observations of the agent. This knowledge is accumulated and transferred as an exploration behaviour whenever a new task is presented to the agent. The effect is that as the agent encounters more tasks, it is able to learn them faster and achieve greater overall performance. This approach is illustrated in experiments in a simulated extended navigation domain.

Robotic agents often map perceptual input to simplified representations that do not reflect the complexity and richness of the world. This simplification is due in large part to the limitations of planning algorithms, which fail in large stochastic state spaces on account of the well-known "curse of dimensionality." Existing approaches to address this problem fail to prevent autonomous agents from considering many actions which would be obviously irrelevant to a human solving the same problem. We formalize the notion of affordances as knowledge added to an Markov Decision Process (MDP) that prunes actions in a state- and reward- general way. This pruning significantly reduces the number of state-action pairs the agent needs to evaluate in order to act near-optimally. We demonstrate our approach in the Minecraft domain as a model for robotic tasks, showing significant increase in speed and reduction in state-space exploration during planning. Further, we provide a learning framework that enables an agent to learn affordances through experience, opening the door for agents to learn to adapt and plan through new situations. We provide preliminary results indicating that the learning process effectively produces affordances that help solve an MDP faster, suggesting that affordances serve as an effective, transferable piece of knowledge for planning agents in large state spaces.

Children with complex health conditions require care from a large, diverse set of caregivers that includes parents and community support organizations as well as multiple types of medical professionals. Coordination of their care is essential for good outcomes, and  extensive  research has shown that the use of integrated, team-based care plans improves care coordination. Care plans, however, are rarely deployed in practice. This paper describes barriers to effective implementation of care plans in complex care revealed by a study of care providers treating such children. It draws on teamwork theories, identifying ways AI capabilities could enhance care plan use; describes the design of GoalKeeper, a system to support providers use of care plans; and describes  initial work toward information sharing algorithms for such systems.