Execution infrastructure for normative virtual environments

Trescak, Tomas; Rodriguez, Inmaculada; Lopez-Sanchez, Maite; Almajano, Pablo

doi:10.1016/j.engappai.2012.09.016

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…By creating a 'normative environment that offers immersive experience', virtual institutions support social interaction and collaboration among other qualities. Early uses of VIs in E-Commerce (Bogdanovych et al, 2005) created a new 3D world for people to interact in, separate from their existing online habitus, although subsequent development used Second Life as the infrastructure, and developed the idea of a causal connection layer between the virtual world and the institution (Trescak et al, 2013). VIs have also been integrated into the fabric of game worlds for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (Aranda et al, 2012).…”

Section: Interfaces To Electronic Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Softening electronic institutions to support natural interaction

Murray-Rust¹,

Papapanagiotou

Robertson³

2015

HCj

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A necessary feature of social networks is a model of interaction which is followed on the network---some structure which coordinates activity between the participants. These interaction models are typically implicit, making it a challenge to both design and communicate the protocols for interaction and coordination. Electronic institution systems are one of the principal ways in which multi-agent systems engineers address this issue of coordination in complex interactions between groups of agents. In electronic institutions, interaction models can be concisely specified as protocols which encode the norms which computational agents follow. However, the formality and the up-front costs of discovering and choosing to engage with these systems has limited their applicability to human interaction. The vast majority of human (and, increasingly, automated) social interaction is now taking place in social media systems where social norms are softer concepts regulated essentially by the people involved. Being able to leverage the power of electronic institutions in these systems would ease the application of computational intelligence in support of social tasks.We describe a method by which electronic institutions can act in synergy with these sorts of social media streams and, in doing so, we define a ``softer'' style of system that, nevertheless, retains connection to precise specifications of coordination. In addition, we question the tacit assumption that participating agents deliberately join appropriate institutions. Although our method is independent of choice of social media stream (given a few standard characteristics of these) we describe an implementation of the method using Twitter as a target media stream.We illustrate the utility of our approach with an example which benefits from computational coordination, but where the use of a traditional EI would have prohibitive up-front costs. As well as a trace of a synthetic version, we demonstrate the functioning of a complete implementation which can run the example, and discuss how minimal the end-user configuration to setup complex examples can be.

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Section: Interfaces To Electronic Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Softening electronic institutions to support natural interaction

Murray-Rust¹,

Papapanagiotou

Robertson³

2015

HCj

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“…As previously introduced, Virtual Institutions paradigm allows the creation of Hybrid Structured 3D environments. VIXEE [11] is the Virtual Institutions eXEcution Environment that connects an Electronic Institution (EI) and several 3D Virtual Worlds (VW). It enables the validation of…”

Section: Conversational Structured 3d Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conversational Structured Hybrid 3D Virtual Environments

Almajano

Mayas

Rodriguez

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the XV International Conference on Human Computer Interaction

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Structured 3D Virtual Environments are 3D virtual spaces where some users' interactions are regulated by a subjacent Organisation Centered Multi Agent System (OCMAS) -an Electronic Institution (EI). They are task-oriented hybrid systems, where staff (organisational) software agents support -based on activities' specification and current EI statehuman users in their task achievement. The contribution of this paper is a conversational task-oriented structured 3D environment, where users interact with staff bots (i.e. the embodiment of staff agents) using natural language and, as a result, the communication is improved. With this aim, we extend the Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language (AIML) with special tags to enable the complex flow of task-oriented conversations. They are characterised by different conversation' states -such as asked, responded, failed or confirmedand by data types from the EI ontology. We evaluate the usability of our conversational proposal and compare it to a previous command-based interaction system. As expected, data analysis on users' skills -command-based novice vs expert profile-suggests the co-existence both conversational and command-based user-agent interaction styles. But overall, results show a higher users' satisfaction with the conversational approach which, in average, also performs better in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and errors.

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“…Visual user interfaces for Electronic Institutions have been created before, for example in [9]. In their work the user controls an avatar that walks around in a 3-dimensional virtual world that represents the EI.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human Interactions in Electronic Institutions

Jonge

Rosell

Sierra

2013

Agreement Technologies

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Every social network has its own fixed, but different, set of rules that apply to all users. This reflects the fact that in real life every community has different norms depending on the relationships between its members. Unfortunately this has required people to create many different social networks that exist next to each other even though they have largely overlapping sets of members. In this paper we argue that Electronic Institutions (EI) solve this problem by allowing to create a generic social network in which users can set up their own sub-communities with their own particular norms and protocols. Electronic Institutions make it easy for users to specify these protocols and norms in a visual way, and adapt them when necessary. Furthermore we present a new framework on top of the existing EI architecture that allows humans to interact in any EI. It can generate a graphic user interface from the institutionspecification without the requirement of any extra programming or design. However, it still allows designers to design a more sophisticated, domain specific GUI.

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Execution infrastructure for normative virtual environments

Cited by 8 publications

References 8 publications

Softening electronic institutions to support natural interaction

Softening electronic institutions to support natural interaction

Conversational Structured Hybrid 3D Virtual Environments

Human Interactions in Electronic Institutions

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