eCircus - IST-4- 027656-STP.

• Germany

Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg (Germany)

The University of Bamberg has departments on psychology, education science, business and administration, linguistics and applied computer science. The members of the Institute for Theoretical Psychology (IfTP) work mainly in the field of cognitive science. The goal is the investigation of a theory of human mind integrating the different functional architectures on perception, motivation, cognition and emotion. Different projects are concerned with cognitive modelling, cross-cultural problem solving, problem solving in groups, problem solving in design, and training on problem solving. The head of the department is Professor Dr. Dörner, who is famous for his work on human failure in dealing with complexity and uncertainty. The group at the Institute of Theoretical Psychology has accumulated much experience in investigating people dealing with complex, computer-simulated tasks, and in programming computer-models of various psychological phenomena, such as visual perception, action regulation, emotion, personality, and group interaction. Bamberg was a partner of the FP5 project VICTEC in which they have contributed to earlier work on empathic agents.

Augsburg University

The working tasks assigned to Augsburg University will be conducted by the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications. The Lab is part of the Institute for Computer Science and has a long-term experience in the design, the implementation and evaluation of multimodal user interfaces and intelligent interactive systems. The work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. Projects are usually conducted by an interdisciplinary team consisting of computer scientists, electro-engineers, media designers, cognitive psychologists. The team has been involved in the organization of a number of international events, such as the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments (IDS 2002), the Second conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media (COSIGN 2002), a Dagstuhl Workshop on Evaluating Conversational Agents in March 2004 and a Tutorial and Research Workshop on Affective Dialogue Systems in June 2004. Strong National and International co-operations with various industrial partners, such as Honda or Siemens AG, in the area of affective virtual characters enhance the competencies of the team. Activities of the team related to the planned project include: work on affective interfaces within the European FP6 Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion (Humaine) and research done in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Lewis Johnson, University of Southern California, within the APA project on affective pedagogical agents funded by Bacatec (Bavarian California Technology Center). Webpage of the team: http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de

Wuerzburg University

The Psychologisches Institut der Universität Würzburg focuses on Educational and developmental Psychology and involves two Professors, six other academics and fifteen researchers. It is involved in a substantial research programme with five projects funded by the German Research Foundation, including a longitudinal study of Theory of Mind and Metacognition in schoolchildren and a project autobiographical memory, eyewitness reports, and suggestibility in children and adults.

• Italy

Interagens

Interagens s.r.l. is a software start-up located in Rome, Italy, that provides organizations with advanced communication and education services based on lifelike computer characters. Interagens has received several prizes and grants: the business idea got the 1st prize from BIC Lazio (Business Innovation Center of the Lazio Region, Italy), and the business plan has been awarded grants from the City of Rome, the Province of Rome, and the e2blab business incubator. Interagens has developed a patent-pending innovative technology for authoring and controlling lifelike computer characters, which has been rated 1st in a public competition for funding. The company is a brainchild of Paola Rizzo.

• Portugal

INESC-ID

INESC-ID, which in Portuguese stands for Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering: Research and Development is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to research in the field of information technology, electronics and telecommunications. Researchers at INESC-ID are in their vast majority university staff and graduate students. INESC-ID initiated activity in the year 2000 as a result of a reorganization of INESC. The former research groups of INESC have been congregated to form INESC-ID, who is owned in large part by IST (a science and technology school of the Technical University of Lisbon) and INESC. The principal objectives of INESC-ID are to conduct cutting-edge research in the fields of information technology and to transfer technology to the industry by means of R&D contracts and training courses.

INESC is well-known for its importance in creating and increasing the value of Portuguese SME's, with which the institution maintains close links through various contracts of technical and specialised assistance. The activity of INESC-ID is divided in 5 scientific and technological areas: Information Systems, Signal Processing, Electronic Systems, Telecommunications and Solid State Technology. Each of these areas is further divided in several research groups led by senior researchers.

INESC-ID has about 80 researchers. Of these, 50 are senior researchers holding a PhD degree or equivalent, and the remaining are preparing their Master's or PhD dissertations. Since IST is the main owner of INESCID, the majority of researchers also have teaching positions at IST.

• United Kingdom

Heriot-Watt University

Heriot-Watt is a modern and dynamic technological university, established by Royal Charter in 1966, and committed to excellent teaching and research in its specialist areas of applied sciences and mathematics, engineering and technology, textiles, business management and languages. It has a reputation for enterprise, innovative education and leading edge but practical research, and is one of the top UK universities for income from business and industry. Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University has some 25 academics supported by research staff, postgraduate students and technicians. Research activities maintain close links with industry, with emphasis on the application of research to the solution of real-world problems. It received a Grade 4 in the UK 2001 Research Assessment Exercise demonstrating that much of its research work is internationally competitive. The Intelligent Systems Laboratory is involved in agent based and knowledge based systems, affective computing, artificial neural networks and evolutionary computing for a range of applications such as computational neuroscience, computer based diagnosis and classification, intelligent user interfaces and fault-tolerant robotics. Cognitive science researchers are investigating how humans perceive, classify and represent objects, and how skilled movements are guided by vision. Current projects include the neural network modelling of human category learning and the application of psychophysical methods to the evaluation of computer graphics techniques. It has participated in a wide range of industrial collaborative research projects, including 5 major EU projects, as well as traditional EPSRC funded research. It works alongside the Image Systems Engineering Laboratory which has a uniquely broad range of experience and backgrounds, enabling a truly multidisciplinary approach to research which has applications from the aviation industry to clinical medicine. Its current areas include support of industrial processes using augmented and virtual reality and human computer interaction and human perception in e-learning.

University of Hertfordshire

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire is one of the largest in the UK, and was awarded a rating of 4 out of 5 in the national Research Assessment Exercise in 1992, 1996 and 2001, recognising that it conducts research of national and international excellence. The Department has attracted funding by such bodies as the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Royal Society, The Nuffield Foundation, EU initiatives, the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), and industry including British Aerospace. Specific expertise of the Department relevant to the current proposal are Adaptive Systems, Algorithms, and Interactive Systems. The Adaptive Systems Research group at University of Hertfordshire is a strongly interdisciplinary group including roboticists, biologists, cognitive scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists. The group has particular expertise in Social Robotics, Robot-Human Interaction, and Socially Intelligent Agents in design, therapy and education, as well as Robot learning, Learning by Observation, Cognitive Technology, Interactive Systems, Sensor Evolution, Biological Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Evolutionary Computation. Associated to the group is the Hertfordshire Interactive Systems and Robotics Laboratory that is particularly suited for experiments involving physical robots. Members of the group are leading research at an international level and have received funding by UK, European (IST), and other funding agencies. The group includes 15 academic members as well as 15 PhD students.

University of Sunderland (UK)

The University of Sunderland is a dynamic, modern university with high standards of teaching and research and a growing reputation as the university for enterprise, employment and opportunity. It has schools in business; art, design, media and culture; computing and technology; education and lifelong learning; and health and social sciences. The School of Computing & Technology has a strong and growing research profile with 5 EPSRC, 5 EUfunded and 6 commercially sponsored projects and around 80 registered research students. The School has a strong track record in the area of interactive media. It is a Macromedia Authorised Training Partner, provides post-graduate courses in interactive media management participates in a range of national and international projects in interactive media and leads the Northern IT Reach Out project. The School of Computing and Technology has particular strengths in the development of participatory design approaches, classroom-based studies, children’s interaction needs and requirements and new media

development and production. It has extensive new facilities for usability testing of innovative technology and new media production. The University has, partnership and sponsorship with companies such as Sony, British Telecom, Macromedia, Microsoft, etc. and has strong links with the Digital Media sector through Codeworks (Centre of Digital Excellence).

University of Warwick

The University of Warwick in Coventry is one of the leading universities in the United Kingdom. Established in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand access to higher education, Warwick has grown to become one of the highest-ranked universities in the UK, consistently in the top 10 since its inception.

The Department of Psychology was founded in 1974 and is part of the Science Faculty. It has particular strengths in developmental, cognitive and experimental psychology, in the areas of bullying, memory, reasoning, categorization, ageing, vision and attention, normal and disturbed reading and spelling as well as speech. The Department has attracted funding by such bodies as the European Commission and The Economic and Social Research Council, UK.

Sixth Framework Programme

Policy area: information society and media, research and technology, inclusion, education, training and youth

EU initiative:Technology enhanced learning

Education through characters with emotional-intelligence and roleplaying capabilities that understand social interaction.

eCIRCUS will develop a new approach in the use of ICT to support social and emotional learning within Personal and Social Education (PSE).

This will be achieved through virtual role-play with synthetic characters that establish credible and empathic relations with the learners. To attain this, eCIRCUS investigates educational role-play using autonomous synthetic characters and involving the child through affective engagement, including the use of standard and highly innovative interaction mechanisms.

This project will develop novel conceptual models and innovative technology to support learning through role-play and affective engagement for Personal and Social Education (PSE) involving complex social situations. It will do this by taking modern theories of narrative and role-play from psychology and implementing them in affectively driven autonomous graphically embodied agents – actors with attitude.

It will deliver this technology through a VLE for emotional and social learning, developed through two showcases:

• one on anti-bullying education
• one on intercultural empathy

The dissemination of results from this project could have a significant impact on approaches to social and emotional learning; improving quality and innovation in learning technologies; determining approaches to combat bullying and support conflict resolution; and potentially improving the quality of life in European schools.

e-CIRCUS aims to develop novel conceptual models and innovative technology to support social and emotional learning through role-play and affective engagement for Personal and Social Education involving

complex social situations. The main objective of this project is to enhance learning through the use of a new kind of interactive 3D environment that explores virtual play and improvisational drama with synthetic characters. The project will target Personal and Social Education in which empathy and emotional engagement are key factors, using the hard problems of bullying and refugee integration in schools as exemplars. It has the following objectives:

1. To develop models of narrative engagement and empathy in order to investigate and understand cognitive, social and emotional learning processes through role-play and affective engagement in complex social situations.
2. To support affective engagement in social and emotional learning, investigating methods to allow individual and groups of users to interact in the physical as well as the virtual world, with user roles including both spectator and actor.
3. To create an innovative architecture to enable educational role-play for social and emotional learning in virtual environments populated by synthetic characters with autobiographical memory, individual personalities and attributes and improvisational capabilities.
4. To create a virtual environment for emotional and social learning focusing on the domains of bullying and refugee integration
5. To assess the impact and effectiveness of using learner scenarios and role-play to address socially sensitive issues, within virtual learning environments.

Through achieving these objectives, e-CIRCUS will:

• Investigate an innovative technology enhanced approach to social and emotional learning. The longitudinal study will measure the impact of the use of the project software on the incidence of bullying in the included schools, providing an indication of the impact of the project. The project will develop a questionnaire-based measure for the degree of intercultural empathy in the classroom and will assess the impact of the project software on it.
• Create affectively engaging educational software, assessed through longitudinal and largescale studies investigating the long-term pedagogical impact, engagement, usefulness, and satisfaction for the desired end user-group. This would have potentially large-scale effects, not only on the learning experience, but also on e-learning providers, who would be able to use the affective loop as the basis for wholly novel products and systems.

• Extend and increase the potential and abilities of synthetic characters for empathic and affective engagement. The results from this project incorporate a number of significant advances, for example, characters with autobiographical memories, personality and life-like behaviour; and affective engagement mechanisms the effectiveness of which have considerable relevance for games and recreational software.

• Provide greater knowledge of the use of IT within the classroom and the potential of innovative IT product use to explore difficult and sensitive subjects. This could have considerable impact on the use of ICT and multimedia in schools.

• Provide policy makers with detailed information on children’s views and experiences of bullying and refugee integration and with the potential to support education about these PSE issues using innovative technology. This should have a significant impact on strategies to combat bullying and integrate refugees within European schools.

The eCircus project contained the development of 2 large software projects: the anti-bullying application FearNot! and the educational role playing game ORIENT. Both these applications are available to download for free from this website and for both the source code is available on SourceForge.

The project considered the application of 3D animated synthetic characters and emergent narrative to create improvised dramas to address bullying problems for children aged 8-12 in the UK, Germany and Portugal. Output 2 (Orient Game) is an educationally relevant issue that will target children in the 13-14 year old age bracket.

• Pedagogical
• E-Inclusion

Two Role Play games were created as a result of this Project: the anti-bullying application FearNot! and the educational role playing game ORIENT. Both these applications are available to download for free from this website and for both the source code is available on SourceForge.

eCIRCUS (Education through characters with emotional intelligence and role playing capabilities that understand social interaction) intends to further develop the FearNot! technology and carry out on a number of large-scale longitudinal psychological evaluations in schools using both the FearNot! software and the purpose built ORIENT software to be developed in the course of the project.

VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) a European framework V project was carried out between 2002-2005.

The project considered the application of 3D animated synthetic characters and emergent narrative to create improvised dramas to address bullying problems for children aged 8-12 in the UK, Germany and Portugal. Like VICTEC, eCIRCUS is to support social and emotional learning through role-play and affective engagement for Personal and Social Health Education (PSHE) involving complex social situations.

Synthetic characters: A synthetic character is an autonomous character driven by an intelligent architecture whose interactions are not pre-scripted.

Emergent narrative: Emergent narrative builds upon the model of improvisational drama rather than authored stories: an initial situation and characters with well defined personalities and roles produces an unscripted interaction driven by real-time choices.

The ORIENT demonstrator is in the area of integration of refugee/immigrant children in schools. In this application, role-playing characters interact with child users in a number of different ways so as to create inter-cultural empathy.

The ORIENT software will provide a role-play and story-framework for virtual actors. It will incorporate actors-with-attitude with interaction supported through the interaction modalities developed in the eCIRCUS project. The novel models and original architecture that have emerged from the results, recommendations and developments of the FEARNOT! software will be technologically evaluated.

Many Conference and Journal papers resulted from this project in the areas of Psychology, Multi-disciplinary, and Computer Science. These are avaliable from the project website under the Publication Link.