Virtual Human Toolkit 2018 (31x)

Notes:

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is a collection of software tools and libraries that are designed to support the development of virtual human conversational characters. The toolkit is developed by the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), and is part of the ICT Virtual Human project, which aims to create realistic and engaging virtual human agents that can interact with users in a natural and intuitive way.

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit includes a range of modules, libraries, and tools that are designed to support the creation of virtual human conversational characters, such as character animation and speech synthesis modules, behavior modeling and decision-making algorithms, and natural language understanding and generation tools. The toolkit also includes a range of development tools and utilities that make it easier for developers to create and manage virtual human agents, such as character editors, behavior editors, and simulation environments.

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is used by researchers, developers, and educators to create virtual human agents that can be used in a variety of applications, such as training simulations, interactive games, and conversational agents. By providing a comprehensive set of tools and libraries that support the creation of virtual human agents, the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit helps to accelerate the development of virtual human technology and to make it more accessible to a wider range of users.

The references below appear to be discussing the use of virtual human systems in a variety of contexts, including virtual learning environments, museum settings, and social skills training. The Virtual Human Toolkit is mentioned as a source for creating virtual humans, and the text mentions the use of tools such as the virtual human toolkit for coordinating dialogue and animations. The text also mentions the use of wizards to control the behavior of virtual humans and the importance of standards for virtual human systems. The text also touches on the use of virtual humans in studying social interaction, cultural differences in emotional expressivity, and resilience in victims of bullying.

Wizards are a type of interface that can be used to control the behavior of virtual humans by defining high-level commands or instructions for the virtual human to follow. These commands or instructions can be used to specify the virtual human’s actions, behaviors, and responses to various stimuli or events. Wizards can be used to control the behavior of virtual humans in a variety of settings, such as virtual training environments, virtual therapy sessions, or virtual customer service interactions. They can be particularly useful in situations where it is important to have precise control over the virtual human’s behavior, or where the virtual human needs to respond to a large number of different stimuli or events in a consistent manner. By providing a simple, user-friendly interface for defining the virtual human’s behavior, wizards can help users to more easily create and customize virtual human interactions for a wide range of applications.

Resources:

clear.colorado.edu .. computational language and education research, formerly center for spoken language research (cslr)
ict.usc.edu/prototypes/vhtoolkit
phoenix dialog manager .. olympus incorporates the ravenclaw dialog manager
phoenix semantic parser .. phoenix semantic frame parser
smartbody.ict.usc.edu
sourceforge.net/projects/smartbody
vhtoolkit.ict.usc.edu

Wikipedia:

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape
X Pan, AFC Hamilton – British Journal of Psychology, 2018 – Wiley Online Library
… provides appropriate outputs. The outputs must be translated into speech and gestures using tools such as BEAT (Cassell, Vilhjálmsson, & Bickmore, 2001) or the Virtual Human Toolkit (Gratch & Hartholt, 2013). Each system …

Virtual human role players for studying social factors in organizational decision making
P Khooshabeh, G Lucas – Frontiers in psychology, 2018 – frontiersin.org
… The Virtual Human Toolkit (Hartholt et al., 2013) makes it possible to design and develop the technical aspects that help realize these virtual human scenarios (see Figure 1). However, a necessary first step is to conduct and understand cognitive task analyses of the cyber …

Virtual agent interaction framework (VAIF): A tool for rapid development of social agents
I Gris, D Novick – Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on …, 2018 – dl.acm.org
… 2 BACKGROUND The complexity of creating embodied conversational agents (ECAs) [1], and systems with ECAs, has long been recognized (eg, [2]). To date, the most comprehensive support for developers of ECAs has been the Virtual Human Toolkit (VHT) [3], an extensive …

Towards a generic framework for multi-party dialogue with virtual humans
R Harel, Z Yumak, F Dignum – … of the 31st International Conference on …, 2018 – rharel.com
… achieve a technical goal. Relevant contributions in this domain include the Virtual Human Toolkit, ‘Sensitive Artificial Listeners’, and Lopez et al.’s work on agents for collaborative virtual training [7, 13, 18]. Notable dialogue manage …

Scoutbot: A dialogue system for collaborative navigation
SM Lukin, F Gervits, CJ Hayes, A Leuski… – arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2018 – arxiv.org
… Arno Hartholt, David Traum, Stacy C Marsella, Ari Shapiro, Giota Stratou, Anton Leuski, Louis- Philippe Morency, and Jonathan Gratch. 2013. All Together Now Introducing the Virtual Human Toolkit. In Proc. of Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 368–381. Springer …

“I Didn’T Tell You Sooner Because I Didn’T Know How To Handle It Myself.” Developing A Virtual Reality Program To Support …
KE Muessig, KA Knudtson, K Soni… – Digital culture & …, 2018 – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A Novel Realizer of Conversational Behavior for Affective and Personalized Human Machine Interaction-EVA U-Realizer
I MLAKAR, Z KA?I?, M BORKO… – WSEAS transactions on …, 2018 – researchgate.net
… BML. Among BML realizers, Unity 3D has been chosen as the preferred animation engine. Nevertheless, the Virtual Human Toolkit (VHTK) [16] uses SmartBody [17] as the underlying realization and animation engine. Further …

Autonomous Agent that Provides Automated Feedback Improves Negotiation Skills
S Monahan, E Johnson, G Lucas, J Finch… – … Conference on Artificial …, 2018 – Springer
… CRA is a semi-automated system capable of carrying out a negotiation with a user. The virtual human toolkit [16] executed low-level dialogue functions automatically, while two wizards (WoZ) provide high-level guidance for the agent’s behaviors …

Controlling synthetic characters in simulations: A case for cognitive architectures and Sigma
V Ustun, PS Rosenbloom, S Sajjadi, J Nuttall… – Proceedings of I/ITSEC …, 2018 – bcf.usc.edu
… All three models leverage VH Messages in the VHMsg library of the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit (2009) to establish communication between the Sigma model and the OpenAI, SmartBody, and Unity platforms. The Frozen Lake Model …

Directing Virtual Humans Using Play-Scripts and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
C Talbot – 2018 – researchgate.net
… placement. Once placed, these characters do not tend to move. The current state-of-the-art includes capabilities such as the Institute for Creative Technology’s (ICT) Virtual Human Toolkit (VHT), which provides discourse and emotion engines for interacting with characters [35] …

Model for Verbal Interaction between an Embodied Tutor and a Learner in Virtual Environments
R Querrec, J Taoum, B Nakhal… – 18th ACM International …, 2018 – hal.archives-ouvertes.fr
… [4] Arno Hartholt, David Traum, Stacy C. Marsella, Ari Shapiro, Giota Stratou, Anton Leuski, Louis-Philippe Morency, and Jonathan Gratch. 2013. All Together Now: Introducing the Virtual Human Toolkit. In 13th IVA. Edinburgh, UK …

HVUAN–A Rapid-Development Framework for Spanish-Speaking Virtual Humans
D Herrera, L Herrera, Y Velandia – … on Practical Applications of Agents and …, 2018 – Springer
… Fortunately, releases such as the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit 1 and UTEP’s Virtual Agent Framework 2 (VAIF) [7] have reduced this cost, enabling non-expert users to create virtual humans for their needs without too much effort, exploring different types of virtual human systems …

The Importance of Regulatory Fit & Early Success in a Human-Machine Game
E Pincus, S Lei, G Lucas, E Johnson, M Tsang… – Proceedings of the …, 2018 – dl.acm.org
… 3.3 Game-Agent The GA is a modular collection of components, many from the open-source virtual human toolkit [10] as well as 3 additional com- ponents: a clue generator, a dialogue manager, and a set of auxiliary GUIs described in the beginning of this section …

Virtual agents for professional social skills training: An overview of the state-of-the-art
K Bosman, T Bosse, D Formolo – International Conference on Intelligent …, 2018 – Springer
… information. Perhaps the most important lesson that can be learned from this is that it is advisable to strive towards a more uniform standard for the development of IVAs (eg, the Virtual Human Toolkit [5]). 5 Conclusion. This paper …

A Model for Eye and Head Motion for Virtual Agents
J Krejsa, B Kerou, F Liarokapis – 2018 10th International …, 2018 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
… 677-687, 2010. [6] A. Hartholt, D. Traum, SC Marsella, A. Shapiro, G. Stratou, A. Leuski, L.-P. Morency, and J. Gratch. “All Together Now: Introducing the Virtual Human Toolkit,” In 13th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2013. [7] A. Shapiro …

Towards Understanding the Influence of a Virtual Agent’s Emotional Expression on Personal Space
U Habel, TW Kuhlen – vci.rwth-aachen.de
… Task: Display: Desktop HMD CAVE Sample 1) all runs of En 2/3) all runs of Ea & Eh, E order randomized PassBy — mixed runs of Ea & Eh of our pilot study (see Figure 1 (a)). This model is taken from and animated by the virtual human toolkit SmartBody [20] …

Influences on the Elicitation of Interpersonal Space with Virtual Humans
DM Krum, SH Kang, T Phan – … on Virtual Reality and 3D User …, 2018 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
… The virtual humans were created and animated using the Virtual Human Toolkit developed by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies [11]. The virtual human was selected to match gender with the human study participant to control for gender effects …

Socio-Cultural Effects of Virtual Counseling Interviewers as Mediated by Smartphone Video Conferencing
SH Kang, DM Krum, P Khooshabeh, T Phan… – Proceedings of the 31st …, 2018 – dl.acm.org
… The virtual humans were created and animated using the Virtual Human Toolkit developed by the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. Figure 1: Single-tasking behavior: male and female [left] and multi-tasking behavior [right] …

Toward Automatically Measuring Learner Ability from Human-Machine Dialog Interactions using Novel Psychometric Models
V Ramanarayanan, M LaMar – … of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative …, 2018 – aclweb.org
… Indeed, there are multiple academic (Olym- pus (Bohus et al., 2007), Alex (Jurc?cek et al., 2014), Virtual Human Toolkit (Hartholt et al., 2013), Open- Dial5, etc.) and industrial (Voxeo6, Alexa 7, etc.) im- plementations of dialog systems, any of which can be …

Architecture and Ontology in the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring: 2018 Update
K Brawner, M Hoffman – gifttutoring.org
… VIRTUAL HUMAN TOOLKIT (VHTK) … The Virtual Human Toolkit (VHTk) is a collection of modules, tools, and libraries designed to aid and support researchers and developers with the creation of virtual human conversational characters (Hartholt et al., 2013) …

An Emotionally Aware Embodied Conversational Agent
SS Sohn, X Zhang, F Geraci, M Kapadia – Proceedings of the 17th …, 2018 – ifaamas.org
… 2016. Cross Modal Evaluation of High Quality Emotional Speech Synthesis with the Virtual Human Toolkit. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 190–197. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-319- 47665-0_17 [15] S. Robinson, D. Traum, M. Ittycheriah, and J. Henderer. 2008 …

Saving Face in Front of the Computer? Culture and Attributions of Human Likeness Influence Users’ Experience of Automatic Facial Emotion Recognition
JP Stein, P Ohler – Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 2018 – frontiersin.org
In human-to-human contexts, display rules provide an empirically sound construct to explain intercultural differences in emotional expressivity. A very prominent finding in this regard is that cultures rooted in collectivism—such as China, South Korea, or Japan—uphold norms of emotional …

Flipper 2.0: A Pragmatic Dialogue Engine for Embodied Conversational Agents
J van Waterschoot, M Bruijnes, J Flokstra… – Proceedings of the 18th …, 2018 – dl.acm.org
Page 1. Flipper 2.0 A Pragmatic Dialogue Engine for Embodied Conversational Agents Jelte van Waterschoot jbvanwaterschoot@utwente.nl University of Twente Enschede, Netherlands Merijn Bruijnes m.bruijnes@utwente.nl University of Twente Enschede, Netherlands …

Exploring the use of robots for museum settings and for learning heritage languages and cultures at the chinese heritage centre
WC Pang, CY Wong, G Seet – PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual …, 2018 – MIT Press
… The Virtual Human Toolkit (Hartholt et al., 2013) has been utilized to gener- ate a virtual character for the robotic museum guide application … Cur- rently, the virtual human toolkit has been implemented on an additional laptop computer that runs on the Windows operating system …

Being bullied in virtual environments: experiences and reactions of male and female students to a male or female oppressor
N Krämer, S Sobieraj, D Feng, E Trubina… – Frontiers in …, 2018 – frontiersin.org
Bullying is a pressing societal problem. As such, it is important to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in bullying and of resilience factors which might protect victims. Moreover, it is necessary to provide tools that can train potential victims to strengthen their …

Presenting a Modular Framework for a Holistic Simulation of Manual Assembly Tasks
F Gaisbauer, P Agethen, M Otto, T Bär, J Sues… – Procedia CIRP, 2018 – uni-ulm.de
… The system focuses mainly on interac- tion, walking and behavior modeling. The implementation con- tained in the Virtual Human Toolkit [23] has been used, whereas Smartbody is integrated within the Unity3D engine … All Together Now: Introducing the Virtual Human Toolkit …

A Review Of Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tools And Methods
RA Sottilare – … of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Technologies and … – gifttutoring.org
… Page 40. A REVIEW OF INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM AUTHORING TOOLS AND METHODS 3-4 STO-TR-HFM-237 is ongoing to support integration and authoring in the Virtual Human Toolkit [9]. Additional information about GIFT and the GAT is available at www …

Integrating Sensors and Exploiting Sensor Data with GIFT for Im-proved Learning Analytics
JW Kim, RA Sottilare, K Brawner, T Flowers – gifttutoring.org
… methods to vary learner attributes sinusoi- dally Sinusoidal representation of learner attributes (eg, engage- ment) USC Virtual Human Toolkit Multi- sense (Scherer et al., 2012) A perception framework that enables multiple sens …

A Comprehensive Review of Design Goals and Emerging Solutions for Adaptive Instructional Systems.
RA SOTTILARE – Technology, Instruction, Cognition & Learning, 2018 – gifttutoring.org
… Finally, selectors are rules used by the agent to select the most appropriate method available to reach an assigned goal or to deconflict competing goals (eg, Goal A is a higher priority than Goal B). The Virtual Human Toolkit (VHT; Gratch, Hartholt, Dehghani, and Marsella, 2013 …

Mitigating Knowledge Decay from Instruction with Voluntary Use of an Adaptive Learning System
AJ Hampton, BD Nye, PI Pavlik, WR Swartout… – … Conference on Artificial …, 2018 – Springer
… competing teams. Based on feedback from formative studies, the Pal animated agent acts as a supporter and motivator for the student, with dialog and animations coordinated by the Virtual Human toolkit [34]. Pal’s personality …

Annex A ? Intelligent Tutoring System Scientists
RA Sottilare – … of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Technologies and … – gifttutoring.org
Page 103. STO-TR-HFM-237 A-1 Annex A? INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM SCIENTISTS Robert A. Sottilare This annex provides a list of scientists who are researching and developing ITSs, adaptive instruction and ITS-related …