Abstract. The paper reports work to increase the believability of Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player's actions both cognitively and emotionally. We discuss the modelling of adaptive affective autonomous characters based on a biologically-inspired theory of human action regulation taking into account perception, motivation, emotions, memory, learning and planning. These agents populate an educational Role Playing Game, ORI-ENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology) dealing with the cultural-awareness problem for children aged 13 to 14.

This work proposes an initial memory model for a long-term artificial companion, which migrates among virtual and robot platforms based on the context of interactions with the human user. This memory model enables the companion to remember events that are relevant or significant to itself or to the user. For other events which are either ethically sensitive or with a lower long-term value, the memory model supports forgetting through the processes of generalisation and memory restructuring. The proposed memory model draws inspiration from the human short-term and long-term memories. The short-term memory will support companions in focusing on the stimuli that are relevant to their current active goals within the environment. The long-term memory will contain episodic events that are chronologically sequenced and derived from the companion's interaction history both with the environment and the user. There are two key questions that we try to address in this work: 1) What information should the companion remember in order to generate appropriate behaviours and thus smooth the interaction with the user? And, 2) What are the relevant aspects to take into consideration during the design of memory for a companion that can have different types of virtual and physical bodies? Finally, we show an implementation plan of the memory model, focusing on issues of information grounding, activation and sensing based on specific hardware platforms.

Abstract. This paper describes a mobile context-aware 'intelligent affective guide with attitude' that guides visitors touring an outdoor attraction. Its behavior is regulated by a biologically inspired architecture of emotion, allowing it to adapt to the user's needs and feelings. In addition to giving an illusion of life, the guide emulates a real guide's behavior by presenting stories based on the user's interests, its own interests, its belief and its current memory activation. A brief description of the system focusing on the core element -the guide's emotional architectureis given followed by findings from an evaluation with real users.

Abstract. This paper investigates how graphically displayed intelligent virtual actors, mobile devices and innovative interaction modalities can support and enhance educational role-play as well as deepen the sense of engagement and presence in participants to produce more successful learning. The discussion will be presented using a showcase from the eCIRCUS project, ORIENT, an application combining virtual and real life role-play for social and emotional learning.

Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However, while other types of educational activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problem of supporting educational role-play with technology has only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper, we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present results of our evaluation of ORIENT. Ó