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George Shaw's ccs.neu.edu page
I am a PhD student at Northeastern University, currently studying with Professor Tim Bickmore in the Relational Agents Group. Our group looks into ways that conversational agents can be enhanced to form long-term social-emotional relationships with users.
My first project for the group was to develop a Flash-based web-deployable conversational agent based on existing dialogue-generation and speech synthesis software. The project involved building an xml-controlled animation engine that syncs with millisecond precision to streamed audio, modifying the speech synthesis system to provide timing information for the Flash client, and overcoming a variety of issues associated with deploying the software in a network environment.
A demo of this project can be seen here.
The RAG website is here.
I am currently developing a system that will enable a conversational agent to make small talk with users about the weather. The agent will have the ability to interact with users in any location in the US utilizing up to the minute weather data, as well as a variety of historical and forecast data. The system will be deployed in Spring 2009.
An early ppt describing the system is available here.
