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The Embodied Agents Research Group (EMBOTS) is a junior research group in the cluster of excellence Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI) established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative. The cluster comprises Saarland University, MPI Informatik, DFKI, and MPI Software Systems.

The EMBOTS group is based at the German Research Center for AI (DFKI), Intelligent User Interfaces Lab, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Mission Statement

Our work aims at building multimodal human-computer interfaces, focussing on interactive embodied agents. One major challenge is to create the realistic animation of nonverbal behavior like gesture, gaze and posture shifts. To this end, we develop analysis tools, modeling methods and perform empirical validation of our results. The second challenge is to control the high-level behavior of embodied agents, managing user interaction and multimodal input/output. To this end, we design authoring tools that rely on a statechart-like visual interface and will ultimately be combined with plan- and rule-based approaches. In the past, members of our group have contributed both to foundational research and industrial applications. We have the ambition to bridge the gap between theoretical research and actual application, in order to empirically evaluate the end result.

News

We are happy to announce the availability of our EMBR character animation engine that allows researchers to control an avatar using the mid-level EMBRScript language. Visit the EMBR Homepage.

The paper Gesture and Emotion: Can basic gestural form features discriminate emotions? by Kipp/Martin was shortlisted for Best Paper (1 out of 3) at this year's IEEE International Conference for Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII).

This year's GALA Award (Gathering of Lifelike Agents), awarded at the 9th International Conf. for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), goes to EMBOTS member Quan Nguyen for his Master project "Gantool".

Our team hosted the nanoCamp students for a whole day of 3D modelling, application engineering and evaluation on 24 July 2009. The session was broadcast on 3sat on 25 July. Thanks to Alexis Heloir, Jan Miksatko, Quan Nguyen, Ivan Gregor, Patrick Gebhard and "special guest" Angela Mahr for all the preparatory work! Special thanks to our industry partner Charamel for providing several avatars involved in this. You can watch it online: