Arno Hartholt - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Arno Hartholt

National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2007

The goal of the Virtual Humans Project at the University of Southern California's Institute f... more The goal of the Virtual Humans Project at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies is to enrich virtual training environments with virtual humans - autonomous agents that support face-to-face interaction with trainees in a variety of roles - through bringing together many different areas of research including speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue management, cognitive modeling, emotion

Language Resources and Evaluation, 2008

When dealing with large, distributed systems that use state-of-the-art components, individual com... more When dealing with large, distributed systems that use state-of-the-art components, individual components are usually developed in parallel. As development continues, the decoupling invariably leads to a mismatch between how these components internally represent concepts and how they communicate these representations to other components: representations can get out of synch, contain localized errors, or become manageable only by a small group

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

In this paper, we describe an implemented system for emotion-referring dialogue. An agent can eng... more In this paper, we describe an implemented system for emotion-referring dialogue. An agent can engage in emotion-referring dialogue if it first has a model of its own emotions, and secondly has a way of talking about them. We build this facility on to the virtual humans in the MRE project, building upon the existing emotion and dialogue facilities of these agents.

Computer, 2014

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic, debilitating, psychological condition that occ... more Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic, debilitating, psychological condition that occurs in a subset of individuals who experience or witness life-threatening traumatic events. PTSD is highly prevalent in those who served in the military. In this paper, we present the underlying theoretical foundations and existing research on virtual reality exposure therapy, a recently emerging treatment for PTSD. Three virtual reality scenarios used to treat PTSD in active duty military and combat veterans and survivors of terrorism are presented: Virtual Vietnam, Virtual Iraq, and Virtual World Trade Center. Preliminary results of ongoing trials are presented.

Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation - SCA '11, 2011

We present a semi-automatic technique for computing surface correspondences between 3D facial sca... more We present a semi-automatic technique for computing surface correspondences between 3D facial scans in different expressions, such that scan data can be mapped into a common domain for facial animation. The technique can accurately correspond high-resolution scans of widely differing expressions -without requiring intermediate pose sequences -such that they can be used, together with reflectance maps, to create high-quality blendshape-based facial animation. We optimize correspondences through a combination of Image, Shape, and Internal forces, as well as Directable forces to allow a user to interactively guide and refine the solution. Key to our method is a novel representation, called an Active Visage, that balances the advantages of both deformable templates and correspondence computation in a 2D canonical domain. We show that our semi-automatic technique achieves more robust results than automated correspondence alone, and is more precise than is practical with unaided manual input.

Blendshape interpolation is one of the most successful techniques for creating emotive digital ch... more Blendshape interpolation is one of the most successful techniques for creating emotive digital characters for entertainment and simulation purposes. The quest for ever more realistic digital characters has pushed for higher resolution blendshapes. Many existing correspondence techniques, however, have difficulty establishing correspondences between very detailed blendshapes. To further aggravate the problem, in certain cases (such as pronounced wrinkles) exact 1:1

Applied Artificial Intelligence

Proceedings of The IEEE, 2007

There is a great need in the Joint Forces to have human to human interpersonal training for skill... more There is a great need in the Joint Forces to have human to human interpersonal training for skills such as negotiation, leadership, interviewing and cultural training. Virtual environments can be incredible training tools if used properly and used for the correct training application. Virtual environments have already been very successful in training Warfighters how to operate vehicles and weapons systems.

2011 Aerospace Conference, 2011

Julia Campbell, Mark Core, Ron Artstein, Lindsay Armstrong, Arno Hartholt, Cyrus Wilson, Kallirro... more Julia Campbell, Mark Core, Ron Artstein, Lindsay Armstrong, Arno Hartholt, Cyrus Wilson, Kallirroi Georgila, Fabrizio Morbini, Edward Haynes, Dave Gomboc, Mike Birch, Jonathan Bobrow, H. Chad Lane, Jillian Gerten, Anton Leuski, David Traum, Matthew Trimmer, Rich DiNinni, ...

Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2009

Gunslinger isan interactive-entertainment application of virtual humans that transforms an iconic... more Gunslinger isan interactive-entertainment application of virtual humans that transforms an iconic Wild West movie scene into a vivid semblance of reality. The project combines virtual humans technology with Hollywood storytelling and set building into an engaging, mixed-reality, story-driven experience, where a single participant can interact verbally and non-verbally with multiple virtual characters that are imbedded in a real, physical saloon.

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 2004

Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2007

The goal of the Virtual Humans Project at the University of Southern California's Institute for C... more The goal of the Virtual Humans Project at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies is to enrich virtual training environments with virtual humans -autonomous agents that support face-to-face interaction with trainees in a variety of roles -through bringing together many different areas of research including speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue management, cognitive modeling, emotion modeling, nonverbal behavior and speech and knowledge management. The demo at AAAI will focus on our work using virtual humans to train negotiation skills. Conference attendees will negotiate with a virtual human doctor and elder to try to move a clinic out of harm's way in single and multi-party negotiation scenarios using the latest iteration of our Virtual Humans framework. The user will use natural speech to talk to the embodied agents, who will respond in accordance with their internal task model and state. The characters will carry out a multi-party dialogue with verbal and non-verbal behavior. A video of a single-party version of the scenario was shown at AAAI-06. This new interactive demo introduces several new features, including multi-party negotiation, dynamically generated non-verbal behavior and a central ontology.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2008

We present a model of negotiation for virtual agents that extends previous work to be more human-... more We present a model of negotiation for virtual agents that extends previous work to be more human-like and applicable to a broader range of situations, including more than two negotiators with different goals, and negotiating over multiple options. The agents can dynamically change their negotiating strategies based on the current values of several parameters and factors that can be updated in the course of the negotiation. We have implemented this model and done preliminary evaluation within a prototype training system and a three-party negotiation with two virtual humans and one human.

Studies in health technology and informatics, 2014

The stressful experiences that have been characteristic of the combat environments in Iraq and Af... more The stressful experiences that have been characteristic of the combat environments in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced significant numbers of returning service members at risk for developing posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychosocial/behavioral health conditions. This paper describes a set of projects that are expanding the content for inclusion in a newly updated "Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan" Virtual Reality system for the delivery of exposure therapy (VRET) for PTSD with Service Members and Veterans. In addition to the complete rebuilding of this VRET system using the latest version of the Unity Game Engine, the system's content and functionality has been expanded to now support the use of VRET with combat medics/corpsmen and persons who have experienced military sexual trauma (MST). The focus of this paper is to present the rationale and general overview of the progress on these projects that will provide new relevant and customizable options for conducting...