Continuous Planning for Virtual Environments

Author(s):  
Nikos Avradinis ◽  
Themis Panayiotopoulos

This chapter discusses the application of intelligent planning techniques to virtual agent environments as a mechanism to control and generate plausible virtual agent behaviour. The authors argue that the real world-like nature of intelligent virtual environments (IVEs) presents issues that cannot be tackled with a classic, off-line planner where planning takes place beforehand and execution is performed later, based on a set of precompiled instructions. What IVEs call for is continuous planning, a generative system that will work in parallel with execution, constantly re-evaluating world knowledge and adjusting plans according to new data. The authors argue further on the importance of incorporating the modelling of the agents’ physical, mental and emotional states as an inherent feature in a continuous planning system targeted towards IVEs, necessary to achieve plausibility in the produced plans and, consequently, in agent behaviour.

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 233-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Peper ◽  
Simone N. Loeffler

Current ambulatory technologies are highly relevant for neuropsychological assessment and treatment as they provide a gateway to real life data. Ambulatory assessment of cognitive complaints, skills and emotional states in natural contexts provides information that has a greater ecological validity than traditional assessment approaches. This issue presents an overview of current technological and methodological innovations, opportunities, problems and limitations of these methods designed for the context-sensitive measurement of cognitive, emotional and behavioral function. The usefulness of selected ambulatory approaches is demonstrated and their relevance for an ecologically valid neuropsychology is highlighted.


2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
Chul Hee Jung ◽  
Min-Geun Lee ◽  
Chang Hyuck Im ◽  
이명원

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Reuding ◽  
Pamela Meil

The predictive value and the reliability of evaluations made in immersive projection environments are limited when compared to the real world. As in other applications of numerical simulations, the acceptance of such techniques does not only depend on the stability of the methods, but also on the quality and credibility of the results obtained. In this paper, we investigate the predictive value of virtual reality and virtual environments when used for engineering assessment tasks. We examine the ergonomics evaluation of a vehicle interior, which is a complex activity relying heavily on know-how gained from personal experience, and compare performance in a VE with performance in the real world. If one assumes that within complex engineering processes certain types of work will be performed by more or less the same personnel, one can infer that a fairly consistent base of experience-based knowledge exists. Under such premises and if evaluations are conducted as comparisons within the VE, we believe that the reliability of the assessments is suitable for conceptual design work. Despite a number of unanswered questions at this time we believe this study leads to a better understanding of what determines the reliability of results obtained in virtual environments, thus making it useful for optimizing virtual prototyping processes and better utilization of the potential of VR and VEs in company work processes.


Author(s):  
Al Campbell ◽  

The attempts to build post-capitalist societies in the twentieth century all used variations of the material-balances economic planning procedures developed first in the USSR. Most advocates of transcending capitalism came to accept the idea that the desired new society could operate only with some variation of such an economic planning tool. One part of the current thorough reconsideration of how to build a human-centered post-capitalist society is reconsidering how it should carry out, in a way consistent with its goals, the social economic planning that all systems of production require. This brief work first addresses a number of misconceptions and myths connected with the identification of planning for socialism with the material-balances planning system. After that, and connected to real-world experiments now going on in a few countries in the world, the work considers if the required social economic planning could occur through conscious control of markets, for countries attempting to build a socialism that uses markets for both the necessary articulation of all the steps in its many production chains and for the distribution of consumer goods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-84
Author(s):  
Boudjemaa Boudaa ◽  
Djamila Figuir ◽  
Slimane Hammoudi ◽  
Sidi mohamed Benslimane

Collaborative and content-based recommender systems are widely employed in several activity domains helping users in finding relevant products and services (i.e., items). However, with the increasing features of items, the users are getting more demanding in their requirements, and these recommender systems are becoming not able to be efficient for this purpose. Built on knowledge bases about users and items, constraint-based recommender systems (CBRSs) come to meet the complex user requirements. Nevertheless, this kind of recommender systems witnesses a rarity in research and remains underutilised, essentially due to difficulties in knowledge acquisition and/or in their software engineering. This paper details a generic software architecture for the CBRSs development. Accordingly, a prototype mobile application called DATAtourist has been realized using DATAtourisme ontology as a recent real-world knowledge source in tourism. The DATAtourist evaluation under varied usage scenarios has demonstrated its usability and reliability to recommend personalized touristic points of interest.


Author(s):  
Arda Tezcan ◽  
Debbie Richards

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have been found to be engaging and provide an environment in which the elements of discovery, exploration and concept testing, fundamental to the field of science, can be experienced. Furthermore, MUVEs accommodate lifelike experiences with the benefit of the situated and distributed nature of cognition; they also provide virtual worlds to simulate the conditions that are not doable or practicable under real world circumstances making them very relevant to many other fields of study such as history, geography and foreign language learning. However, constructing MUVEs can be expensive and time consuming depending on the platform considered. Therefore, providing the most appropriate platform that requires minimal effort, cost and time will make MUVE deployment in the classroom faster and more viable. In this chapter, the authors provide a comparative study of prominent existing platforms for MUVEs that can be used to identify the right balance of functionality, flexibility, effort and cost for a given educational and technical context. A number of metrics are identified, described and used to enable the comparison. Platform assessment was done in four main metric groups: communication and interaction, characters, features and education. Communication and interaction metrics are used to assess how the communication and interaction is done within the examined platform. Character metrics are employed to measure avatar and agent affordances. Features metrics are defined to compare what the platform offers in terms of technology. Lastly, education metrics are used to identify the value of the associated platform for educational purposes.


Author(s):  
Gary Smith

Humans have invaluable real-world knowledge because we have accumulated a lifetime of experiences that help us recognize, understand, and anticipate. Computers do not have real-world experiences to guide them, so they must rely on statistical patterns in their digital data base—which may be helpful, but is certainly fallible. We use emotions as well as logic to construct concepts that help us understand what we see and hear. When we see a dog, we may visualize other dogs, think about the similarities and differences between dogs and cats, or expect the dog to chase after a cat we see nearby. We may remember a childhood pet or recall past encounters with dogs. Remembering that dogs are friendly and loyal, we might smile and want to pet the dog or throw a stick for the dog to fetch. Remembering once being scared by an aggressive dog, we might pull back to a safe distance. A computer does none of this. For a computer, there is no meaningful difference between dog, tiger, and XyB3c, other than the fact that they use different symbols. A computer can count the number of times the word dog is used in a story and retrieve facts about dogs (such as how many legs they have), but computers do not understand words the way humans do, and will not respond to the word dog the way humans do. The lack of real world knowledge is often revealed in software that attempts to interpret words and images. Language translation software programs are designed to convert sentences written or spoken in one language into equivalent sentences in another language. In the 1950s, a Georgetown–IBM team demonstrated the machine translation of 60 sentences from Russian to English using a 250-word vocabulary and six grammatical rules. The lead scientist predicted that, with a larger vocabulary and more rules, translation programs would be perfected in three to five years. Little did he know! He had far too much faith in computers. It has now been more than 60 years and, while translation software is impressive, it is far from perfect. The stumbling blocks are instructive. Humans translate passages by thinking about the content—what the author means—and then expressing that content in another language.


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