Advances in speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies recently have contributed to the development of conversational interfaces that incorporate animated characters. These interfaces potentially are well suited for educational software, since they can engage children as active learners and support question asking skills. In the present research, a simulation study was conducted i...

The Centre for the Study of Human Learn is interested in encouraging self-organisation in learning by helping people to investigate, expand and rebuild models for construing which will enable them to be more successful learners and users of experience. This paper describes how conversational methods are used which are content free, and which lend themselves superbly well to the realtime data pr...

The ability to recognize the Visual Focus of Attention (VFOA, i.e. what or whom a person is looking at) of people is important for robots or conversational agents interacting with multiple people, since it plays a key role in turn-taking, engagement or intention monitoring. As eye gaze estimation is often impossible to achieve, most systems currently rely on head pose as an approximation, creat...

Online communication channels, especially social web platforms, are rapidly replacing traditional ones. Online platforms allow users to overcome physical barriers, enabling worldwide participation. However, the power of online communication bears an important negative consequence — we are exposed to too much information to process. Too many participants, for example, can turn online public spac...

This paper draws on the experiences of management education students following courses using a combination of e-learning and class-based learning methods at Nyenrode University. Evidence is taken from two international MBA courses in Management Information Systems, which followed the same pedagogical design but were delivered using contrasting IT platforms. Both courses were designed to support...

PURPOSE Over the past 50 years, language sample analysis (LSA) has evolved from a powerful research tool that is used to document children's linguistic development into a powerful clinical tool that is used to identify and describe the language skills of children with language impairment. The The Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; J. F. Miller & A. Iglesias, 2008) Software Proje...

This study presents synthetic embodied conversational agents, and how they can be used to explore the persuasive potential of real embodied conversational agents. Utilizing a novel Wizard-of-Oz style approach and a direct measure of behavior change we explore whether ‘ideal’ embodied conversational agents have a similar persuasive impact as real people, and demonstrate the importance of visuall...