Tomoko Koda
at the top of Mt. Fuji (August 22, 1999)
Current address:
Researcher
JST CREST Universal Design of Digitalcity Project
Ishida-lab. Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan
tomoko at acm dot org
Thanks for all the all the participants who gave me valuable comments and feedback. The Java Poker Game ended its mission. If you are interested in the result of the poker project, please check out the result by downloading my master's thesis.
Agents with Faces: A Study on the Effects of Personification of Software Agents
Agents with FacesInterface agents will serve as our colleagues that help us to deal with information overload in the new future. Current human-machine interface with direct manipulation will be replaced by the new agent-based interface with indirect management. We will interact with agents that has human characteristics rather than computers. Graphical representation of agents is the key to make users feel at ease with cooperative work with agents. The proposed research is an experimental approach to seek for the appropriate representation of agents. What characteristics of faces look more intelligent, trustworthy, and likable? Is people's choice of faces as a representation of an interface agent based on the characters' perceived intelligence, trustworthiness, or likability?
Check out this paper on the effect of personification of Agents, presented to Human-Computer Interaction '96, London (Postscript 200K), and this paper (updated version) , presented to IEEE Robot-Human Communication '96, Tsukuba, Japan (Postscript 500K).
I did a survey on people's impression on different faces as a pilot
study of this research.
Click here to
see a preliminary result.
Agents with expressive faces is useful for entertainment. My goal is to make an agent with facial expressions to convey its emotional and internal state. Agents with various abstraction levels and facial expressions play poker against a user. What kind of face looks believable and lifelike? Is a user more involved with the game if there are expressive agents?
Now expressive poker playing agents are ready to play.
Click the images to see their facial expressions.
Caricature Male
[SGI Movie][QuickTime]
Caricature
Female[SGI Movie][QuickTime]
Dog [SGI
Movie][QuickTime]
Smiley[SGI
Movie][QuickTime]
Realistic
Male [SGI Movie][QuickTime]
Realistic
Female[SGI Movie][QuickTime]
Java Poker Game is now ready!! Click here to play poker with the players above, if your web browser supports Java appletts.
Emotionally expressive agents is an attempt to make a computer express its emotions.Another approach is to make a computer detect a user's emotions. Can we make a poker playing agent which detects a person's emotion and changes its strategy? Can we make an tutor agent which try to detect children's interest and internal states (excited/bored) and change study topics according to their states?
Talk to a DolphinThis project started from my dream after seeing the movie "Grand Bleu". It enables us to talk and play with dolphins in a virtual sea. My goal was to make a lifelike character in an immersive environment which understands speech. Click here to see the abstract which I presented at Lifelike Computer Characters '95.
Le Robot Cafe -LEGO project- (1994 fall)Le Robot Cafe is the project which we did in the class called Technological
Tools for Learning. You can check for coffee in the pot in front of
FishBowl at the Media Lab. We used a Logo programmable brick to collect
data from the coffee robot.
Click here
to read a paper on the Coffee Robot (Postscript 93K).
Visual Design Workshop Exhibition Space (1995 spring)This is a collection of graphic designs which I made for the class called Visual Design Workshop.
Go to Autonomous Agents Group page
Go to Media-Lab Welcome page
Go to MIT Home Page
Last modified: Mon Aug 24 17:17:45 JST 1998