Research activities

Current project

TamaCoach: in collaboration with Seiji Yamada, Professor at the NII (National Institute of Informatics), I am studying the effect of an expressive interface agent on the motivation of the user, in the context of an adaptive reminding system for calendar items.

Publications:
- Nadine Richard, Seiji Yamada (2007)
  "Two Issues for an Ambient Reminding System: Context-Awareness and User Feedback"
  Book chapter in Advances in Ambient Intelligence,
  Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Volume 164,
  edited by Juan Carlos Augusto and Daniel Shapiro.
  IOS Press, 2007, 20 pages.
- Nadine Richard, Samuel Tardieu, Seiji Yamada (2007)
  "Cascaded Generic XCS to Learn About Reminding Preferences"
  In proceedings of the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems, co-located with the GECCO conference.
  London, UK, July 2007, 4 pages (poster).
- Nadine Richard, Seiji Yamada (2007)
  "An adaptive, emotional, and expressive reminding system"
  In proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants.
  Stanford, USA, March 2007, 8 pages.
- Nadine Richard, Seiji Yamada (2007)
  "Context-awareness and user feedback for an adaptive reminding system"
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence, co-located with the IJCAI conference.
  Hyderabad, India, January 2007, 5 pages.
- Nadine Richard, Seiji Yamada (2006)
  "Can an emotional agent motivate a user in achieving self-assigned tasks?"
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Effective Multimodal Dialogue Interfaces, co-located with the IUI conference.
  Sydney, Australia, January 2006, 3 pages (position paper).

Past projects

Ambience : ITEA project. For this project, the ENST has built a set of autonomous robots, which were in charge of extending a wireless network (Bluetooth and/or Ethernet radio), when and where it is needed. The robots were cooperating in order to provide the expected connectivity, either spontaneously or under the control of the network administrator. The InViWo (Intuitive Virtual Worlds) platform has been adapted to be executed on the Spif platform.
ANEVA : in collaboration with LIP6 and the GENIE company. This project made use of the InViWo platform and the Marvin language to prototype a 3D video game. All the elements of a scene (including scenery items and simulated creatures) are autonomous agents and interact with the player.
EDICA : in collaboration with LIP6, PPS laboratory (Paris 7 University) and the Cryo-Networks company. The Scol programming language was developed by Cryo-Networks to design large multi-user 3D virtual worlds. The EDICA project aimed at improving the Scol language to facilitate the integration of virtual agents into Scol worlds.

PhD. thesis

My PhD. thesis is entitled describing the behaviours of autonomous virtual agents (written and defended in French). It was supervised by Philippe Codognet (LIP6/INRIA) and Alain Grumbach (ENST), in collaboration with ENST, INRIA and LIP6. This work lead us to design the InViWo model, specify a first version of the Marvin language and implement two prototypes of multi-agent execution platform.

InViWo and Marvin

An InViWo agent is made of attributes, sensors, effectors and behaviours. Its action selection architecture is both distributed and synchronous: it is made of independent, concurrent, synchronized, interconnected behavioural modules. This architecture is inspired by behaviour-based architectures (animats, reactive robotics) and by the synchronous model (real-time systems). The synchronous model ensures the determinism of the behaviour of our agents. An InViWo avatar is a special agent, which represents a user in an InViWo world. An avatar is called semi-autonomous when it is partly controlled by its user.

The InViWo platform is developed in Java under the GPL license. This platform executes the agents and handles the inter-agent communication. The interaction between agents can be observed through any user interface that is able to communicate with an InViWo avatar. The current version of the platform (tested on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows) visualizes an InViWo world either in 2D (with Swing/AWT) or in 3D (with Java3D).

The components of an InViWo agent can be described with the Marvin programming language. In particular, Marvin makes it easy to describe the concurrent, synchronous modules that compose the decision process of the agent. Our language is strongly inspired by the Esterel language. The current Marvin interpreter uses the ANTLR toolkit for the parsing phase and for the generation of an instruction set to be executed by the InViWo platform.

Selection of papers from previous projects

Nadine Richard (2003)
"InViWo agents: write once, display everywhere", [PDF]
proceedings of the Web3D conference. Saint-Malo, France, March 2003.
Nadine Richard, Philippe Codognet and Alain Grumbach (2003)
"Virtual creatures" (in French),
Technique et Science Informatiques (TSI), special issue on Artificial Life. RSTI/TSI, vol. 22(2). Hermès, 2003.
Nadine Richard (2001) [PDF]
"Describing the behaviours of autonomous virtual agents" (in French),
PhD. thesis, ENST. Paris, France, October 2001.
Nadine Richard, Philippe Codognet and Alain Grumbach (2001) [PDF]
"The InViWo toolkit: describing autonomous agents and avatars" ,
proceedings of the IVA'01 (Intelligent Virtual Agents) workshop. Madrid, Spain, September 2001.
Nadine Richard and Philippe Codognet (1998) [PDF]
"Multi-way constraints for describing high-level object behaviours in VRML",
proceedings of the Object-oriented VRML workshop, at the VRML'98 conference. Monterey, USA, February 1998.
More...

Misc

Member of the Organization Committee for the French-speaking ReViCo 1999 Workshop (ENST, Paris, December 1999). This two-days workshop aimed at discussing Cognitive Science issues in Virtual Reality (as a specific application domain).
Member of the Program Committee and of the Organization Committee for the French-speaking Autour du Libre 2003 Conference (ENST, Paris, May 2003). This conference aims at discussing the consequences of free software licenses and of the introduction of the concepts of free software into other production or research domains such as literature, art, collaborative work, politics, etc. During this conference, economists, computer scientists, politicians, journalists, members of various organizations and associations can meet and discuss. The main topic of the 2003 conference was given as a question: is free software (and other "free things") an important choice for the society? Of course, the answer was "yes".
Member of the Program Committee for the Virtual Storytelling 2003 Workshop (Toulouse, November 2003).