This volume began with a workshop of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence held in 2001. Concerned with embodied agents as cultural objects and subjects, the book is divided into three parts. It begins by drawing attention to the cultural embeddedness of technology in general and agent design in particular, as a reminder that there cannot be an agent without culture. The section concludes that agent systems not only can be used to establish a shared understanding, but can also promote the diversity of understanding and identity. Part II consists of chapters dealing with design concepts and reflections on cross-cultural believability. It suggests how an agent's behavior may be adapted to the cultural context of application while maintaining consistency and describes an approach based on the OCC model--which is widely known and used in the embodied agents research community. Next, the section suggests that Affect Control Theory--an empirically-based, mathematically-elaborated perspective on microsociology--can be incorporated into agents in order to give them a capacity for normative role behaviors and emotional displays. Subsequent chapters pass on from more general considerations to the design and implementation of cross-cultural characters and present virtual character design from the perspective of the artist and the practitioner in stressing that corporate culture and audience culture(s) both guide the design choices, but the resulting culturally adapted agent is "handcrafted." It ends with a chapter that reports cross-cultural user studies made in the UK, Austria, and Croatia. Part III discusses the potential of agents as mediators in intercultural communication. It includes an overview of the ways in which embodied agents are and could be used to coach the acquisition of intercultural communication skills, followed by a chapter that suggests agents could be used to intentionally mold intercultural communication. The last chapter addresses the need for a shared sense of community in large-scale collaboration systems for multi-national organizations that transcends any one cultural orientation and that is truly multicultural.

This volume began with a workshop of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence held in 2001. Concerned with embodied agents as cultural objects and subjects, the book is divided into three parts. It begins by drawing attention to the cultural embeddedness of technology in general and agent design in particular, as a reminder that

This book offers valuable new insights into the design of culturally-aware systems. In its first part, it is devoted to presenting selected Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems devised in the field of Artificial Intelligence and its second part consists of two sub-parts that offer a source of inspiration for building modelizations of Culture and of its influence on the human mind and behavior, to be used in new Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems. Those sub-parts present the results of experiments conducted in two fields that study Culture and its influence on the human mind’s functions: Cultural Neuroscience and Cross-Cultural Psychology. In this era of globalization, people from different countries and cultures have the opportunity to interact directly or indirectly in a wide variety of contexts. Despite differences in their ways of thinking and reasoning, their behaviors, their values, lifestyles, customs and habits, languages, religions – in a word, their cultures – they must be able to collaborate on projects, to understand each other’s views, to communicate in such a way that they don’t offend each other, to anticipate the effects of their actions on others, and so on. As such, it is of primary importance to understand how culture affects people’s mental activities, such as perception, interpretation, reasoning, emotion and behavior, in order to anticipate possible misunderstandings due to differences in handling the same situation, and to try and resolve them. Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, the field of Intelligent Systems design, aims at building systems that mimic the behavior of human beings in order to complete tasks more efficiently than humans could by themselves. Consequently, in the last decade, experts and scholars in the field of Intelligent Systems have been increasingly tackling the notion of cultural awareness. A Culturally-Aware Intelligent System can be defined as a system where Culture-related or, more generally, socio-cultural information is modeled and used to design the human-machine interface, or to provide support with the task carried out by the system, be it reasoning, simulation or any other task involving cultural knowledge.

Inspiring debate since the early days of its publication, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979) has exercised its own force as an agent of change in the world of scholarship. Its path-breaking agenda has played a central role in shaping the study of print culture and book history - fields of inquiry that rank among the most exciting and vital areas of scholarly endeavor in recent years. Joining together leading voices in the field of print scholarship, this collection of twenty essays affirms the catalytic properties of Eisenstein's study as a stimulus to further inquiry across geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries. From early modern marginalia to the use of architectural title pages in Renaissance books, from the press in Spanish colonial America to print in the Islamic world, from the role of the printed word in nation-building to changing histories of reading in the electronic age, this book addresses the legacy of Eisenstein's work in print culture studies today as it suggests future directions for the field. In addition to a conversation with Elizabeth L. Tony Ballantyne, Vivek Bhandari, Ann Blair, Barbara A. Brannon, Roger Chartier, Kai-wing Chow, James A. Dewar, Robert A. Gross, David Scott Kastan, Harold Love, Paula McDowell, Jane McRae, Jean-Dominique Mellot, Antonio Rodriguez-Buckingham, Geoffrey Roper, William H. Sherman, Peter Stallybrass, H. Arthur Williamson, and Calhoun Winton.

"This book satisfies the need for methodological consideration and tools for data collection, analysis and presentation in virtual communities, covering studies on various types of virtual communities, making this reference a comprehensive source of research for those in the social sciences and humanities"--Provided by publisher.

This volume, containing the proceedings of IVA 2003, held at Kloster Irsee, in Germany, September 15–17, 2003, is testimony to the growing importance of IntelligentVirtualAgents(IVAs) asaresearch?eld.Wereceived67submissions, nearly twice as many as for IVA 2001, not only from European countries, but from China, Japan, and Korea, and both North and South America. As IVA research develops, a growing number of application areas and pl- forms are also being researched. Interface agents are used as part of larger - plications, often on the Web. Education applications draw on virtual actors and virtual drama, while the advent of 3D mobile computing and the convergence of telephones and PDAs produce geographically-aware guides and mobile - tertainment applications. A theme that will be apparent in a number of the papers in this volume is the impact of embodiment on IVA research – a char- teristic di?erentiating it to some extent from the larger ?eld of software agents.

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--