The paper introduces the COMPANIONS project, a 4 year, EU funded Framework Programme 6 project involving a consortium of 16 partners across 8 countries. It’s aim is to develop a personalised conversational interface, one that knows and understands its owner, and can act as an alternative access point to resources on the Internet, all the while nuturing an emotional involvement from it’s owner/u...

A BST R A C T Migration is the ability of an agent to transfer from one embodiment, for example a robot, to another such as a mobile phone. For agents that are to act as personal companions migration is desirable as access to different capabilities can provide more constant companionship to a user. This interactive demonstration of screen to phone migration illustrates one application of the op...

This document describes the problem statement, the methodological framework, the current state of the work and the expected contribution of my doctoral dissertation. The main focus of my dissertation is long-term interaction with an Artificial Conversational Companion in the context of conversation training for second language acquisition. I use a data-driven approach and conversation analysis ...

This paper is based on several attempts to provide a definition of an Artificial Companion that can be found in the referenced literature. Although accepted by the research community, such descriptions set very high expectations of such agents, but they do not address the technical feasibility and the system limitations, that is why they need an elaborated and precise explanation. In this paper...

In the context of abstract coinduction in complete lattices, the notion of compatible function makes it possible to introduce enhancements of the coinduction proof principle. The largest compatible function, called the companion, subsumes most enhancements and has been proved to enjoy many good properties. Here we move to universal coalgebra, where the corresponding notion is that of a final di...

357 June 2013, Vol. 103, No. 6 SAMJ Feline companions and demography To the Editor: In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, the author goes to visit Gertrude Stein and, sitting downstairs, hears from above the following by Ms Stein: ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do everything, pussy, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’ Hemingway immediately leav...