Deliverable 4.4 - INSEAD CALT

Integratability:AtGentive IST-4-027529-STP - Attentive Agents for Collaborative LearnersThe reasoning module software can be integrated in a very straightforward manner withtask-based applications (i.e. applications that, in some form or another, describe the useractivity in terms of identifiable sequences of actions).Practicality:The events/interventions interface of the reasoning module is defined in a standardmanner so that any application developer should be able, with a reasonable effort, togenerate the appropriate events for the reasoning module, and to receive theinterventions. The manner in which these interventions will be used by the applicationmay range greatly spanning from a simple presentation of the interventions to the user,to complex reasoning about the interventions and changes to the application behaviour.The customisation of the reasoning module (i.e. the creation of application-specific rules)remains a task that would be considered quite laborious but unfortunately we wereunable to address this issue within the time frame of the project. The Reasoning Modulehas been developed using standard open source components, insuring easy reuse andevolution.Limitations:Complexity of reasoning module customisation (see "practicality").Description6.4.5 Agents (animated characters)Two virtual characters have been created (see Figure 1), as well as a framework forcreating and visualising character interventions according to their mood and the strengthof their action. Prior to AtGentive, intervention scripts where directly written and executedas a list of actions composed of animations and dialogs. Now, many scripts areautomatically generated from templates and are well adapted to the context of agentinterventions, as provided by the reasoning module. (See deliverable D2.1 – Designspecification of the Attentive agent modules.)Implementability:This same framework can be used without any modification in other circumstances thanattention management as it allows generating several scripts from a couple ofparameters and benefits to any user who needs to rapidly produce many variations of afew sample scripts. The mechanism is implemented as a client server application wherethe client side is a standard web browsing environment and the server side is any HTTPserver supporting PHP.Integratability:This framework can be used in any web site where the agent communicates with theusers for guiding them, giving news or being a brand ambassador for a company.Practicality:The technical skills required to integrate the characters into an application are the sameas those required for integrating any dynamic component in web pages. The effortcorresponds to any integration tasks involved in web site development.Del 4.4: AtGentive Final Evaluation Report page 84