Gratch, JonathanÉmile is a cognitive architecture for modeling emotions and emotional behaviors in synthetic agents, developed by the USC Computational Emotion Group under Jonathan Gratch -  Associate director for Virtual Humans Research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), Playa Vista, CA, USA, and Stacy Marsella - Associate Director for Social Simulation, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC), Marina del Rey, CA, USA.
The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM.
Email: Этот адрес электронной почты защищён от спам-ботов. У вас должен быть включен JavaScript для просмотра. | Jonathan Gratch's homepage

 


Marsella, Stacy

Stacy Marsella
University of Southern California (USC)
Information Sciences Institute
Marina del Rey, CA, USA
Associate Director for Social Simulation
Email: Этот адрес электронной почты защищён от спам-ботов. У вас должен быть включен JavaScript для просмотра. | webpapers

The 2010 ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award recipients are Prof. Jonathan Gratch and Prof. Stacy Marsella from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, who share the award for their significant and sustained contributions to autonomous agents and multiagent systems in the area of virtual agents, in particular in emotion modeling and social simulation.
Общие сведения
Когнитивная архитектура Émile разработана исследовательской группой под руководством Джонатана Грача (Jonathan Gratch) в Институте креативных технологий (Institute for Creative Technologies - ICT), Плайя Виста, Калифорния, США в составе Университета Южной Калифорнии (University of Southern California - USC) и Стейси Марсела (Stacy Marsella) в Институте информатики  (Information Sciences Institute), Университет Южной Калифорнии, Лос-Анжелес, Калифорния, США.

Архитектура Émile [Gratch, 2000] обеспечивает учет эмоций и их влияния на поведение.
Долгосрочные знания включают в себя Strips-операторы для использования при генерации планов и фреймов связи (construal frames), которые определяют условия (касающиеся событий, ожиданий, целей и стандартов) для выявления различных эмоций.
По мере того, как агент приобретает новую информацию об ожидаемых событиях, модуль оценивания генерирует в ответ эмоции с начальной интенсивностью, являющейся функцией их вероятности и важности, но убывающей со временем.
Собственные эмоции агента фокусируются на усилиях модуля планирования и выбора действия из набора предубеждений, в то время как выводы об эмоциях других агентов направляют выбор его диалогов.


Émile Architecture Overview

Jonathan Gratch’s research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior.

É
mile
[Gratch-2000] provides an architectural account of emotions and their effect on behavior. 
Long-term knowledge includes Strips operators for use in plan generation and construal frames that specify conditions (relating events, expectations, goals, and standards) for eliciting different emotions.

As the agent acquires new information about expected events, an appraisal module generates emotions in response, with initial intensity being a function of their probability and importance, but decaying over time.

The agent’s own emotions focuses efforts of the planning module and biases action selection, while inferences about other agents’ emotions guide its dialogue choices.

Émile builds upon both the Em architecture and the Affective Reasoner project (Elliot 1992) and combines fundamentally two aspects of emotion modelling: appraisal and coping. "Appraisal" in this instance is defined as how the environment or current situation has emotional significance to the agent, and "coping" is how an agent deals with this emotional significance by the modification of its actions and goals (Gratch et al 2003).

The Emotion Aspect

Émile is based on the emotional appraisal of plans and goals, providing a framework for modelling this appraisal in agents. A significant change from the Em architecture mentioned earlier is that Émile allows agents to observe the emotional states of other agents and alter behaviour accordingly (Gratch 2000). It is ideally suited for applications where agents must plan as well as react, thus allowing a greater scope of realism for agents in simulations.

The system is based upon the OCC model of emotions (a potential legacy from the foundation use of Em) which means that it in part, it features an agent's response to goal-based planning as well as being able to assess external events that may have goal implications.

The Architecture in Software

The architecture has been implemented in software by combining it with the IPD architecture (Marsella et al 2000) within the Steve agent behaviour framework (Gratch et al 2001). IPD provides the visual selection of emotions for the agents, and thus complements the behavioural aspects of Émile to allow the developers to create more convincing applications such as the Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRE [8]) (Gratch et al 2001; Marsella et al 2002).

An aspect of Émile that seems beneficial is the ability to include coping mechanisms (Marsella et al 2002) for agents. This is based upon the assumption that human beings generally cope with emotions by doing something about the cause of the emotional trigger, rather than just thinking about the situation that caused the emotion, i.e. a mixture of problem-focused coping, i.e. changing a situation and emotion-focused coping, by changing the individual's view of the situation to change its significance, i.e. shifting responsibility. A second aspect of Émile is the inclusion of emotional intensity linked to how important goals are to agents.

Later developments led to Émile becoming EMA (Emotion & Adaption) (Gratch et al 2004).


Publications
Gratch is the author of over 250 technical articles.
Selected publications
Gratch, J. (2000). Émile: Marshalling passions in training and education. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on autonomous agents (pp. 325–332). Barcelona, Spain.
Elliott C. D. (1992) The Affective Reasoner: A Process Model of Emotions in a Multi-agent System. Ph.D Thesis, Northwestern University.
Gratch, J., Marsella, S. (2001) Tears and Fears: Modeling emotions and emotional behaviours in synthetic agents. Proceedings of the 5th International conference on Autonomous Agents, 2001, 278-285.
Gratch, S., Marsella, J. (2003) Fight the Way you Train: The role and limits of Emotions in training for combat. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 10 (1).
Gratch J., Marsella S. (2004) A Domain-independent Framework for Modeling Emotion. Cognitive Systems Research, 5 (4):269-306.
Marsella, S., Gratch, J. (2002) A Step toward Irrationality: Using emotion to change belief. First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Bologna, Italy.