Conflict is essential for the development of complex plots or more in-depth character design. Therefore, many literary works have employed a conflict-centered narrative structure. However, it is challenging to incorporate conflicts in a planning-based story generation because a planning algorithm constructs a plan that avoids conflicts, which can occur when one action negates the precondition of the other character's action. To address this issue, this paper presents an intelligent storytelling system that can automatically generate conflicts and their resolutions using the interleaved causal relationships between different characters in the story. We describe an example to show that the proposed algorithm can successfully generate a story that contains inter-personal conflicts and is presented in the Virtual Environment. We conclude with a discussion and future study.

In this paper we introduce our ongoing project to design and implement an interactive storytelling in VR. Our particular design intent is to invoke narrative empathy through two narrative devices - change of POV (Point of View) and flashback. Focusing on narrative empathy, we explore design considerations for our project, including story, characters and objects, events and space of possibility, focalization (or POV), flashback and VR implementation.

In this study, we propose a system design for interactive narrative generation which uses database for information exchange among system sub-modules. We present database schema design and a simple example to show how our approach works. We conclude with our future work.

In this paper, we present an interactive and connected tableware system for promoting children to eat vegetables more. Our system aims to encourage children to eat vegetables more and educate them to understand the benefits of those vegetables. Our system comprises a food tray, a spoon and a smartphone cradle, which named "Healthy Tray", "Healthy Spoon" and "Healthy Cradle" respectively. We also present a mobile application with education and gamification elements connected to our tableware. Healthy Cradle is particularly designed to enhance the interaction and communication between children and their parents while playing the game.

In this paper we present DenTeach, a smart brush with a doll-shaped tangible device. We designed and to foster children's good tooth brushing habits by explicitly showing the effect of their tooth brushing on the teeth of a physical avatar in real time. A pilot study conducted with 15 children (ages between 6 and 12) shows that there was possibly positive change of their attitudes to tooth brushing and motivations for tooth brushing when they brushed their teeth with DenTeach. As future work, we plan to develop a smartphone app that interacts with DenTeach so that the children users can constantly check their tooth brushing habits with more fun.

In this paper we investigate how people emotionally respond to the emotional expression of a plant when external stimuli were given to the plant. For this purpose we built a simple LED emoticon-based device as an emotional proxy for delivering inner states of a plant, assuming the inner states of a plant can be changed depending on either positive or negative external stimuli. Our pilot study suggests that people's attitude on plants can be influenced by observing the emotional expressions of a plant.

While games are a popular social media for children, there is a real risk that these children are exposed to potential sexual assault. A number of studies have already addressed this issue, however, the data used in previous research did not properly represent the real chats found in multiplayer online games. To address this issue, we obtained real chat data from MovieStarPlanet, a massively multiplayer online game for children. The research described in this paper aimed to detect predatory behaviors in the chats using machine learning methods. In order to achieve a high accuracy on this task, extensive preprocessing was necessary. We describe three different strategies for data selection and preprocessing, and extensively compare the performance of different learning algorithms on the different data sets and features.

This paper describes our effort for a planning-based computational model of narrative generation that is designed to elicit surprise in the reader's mind, making use of two temporal narrative devices: flashback and foreshadowing. In our computational model, flashback provides a backstory to explain what causes a surprising outcome, while foreshadowing gives hints about the surprise before it occurs. Here, we present Prevoyant, a planning-based computational model of surprise arousal in narrative generation, and analyze the effectiveness of Prevoyant. The work here also presents a methodology to evaluate surprise in narrative generation using a planning-based approach based on the cognitive model of surprise causes. The results of the experiments that we conducted show strong support that Prevoyant effectively generates a discourse structure for surprise arousal in narrative.

Focalization, perspective-taking in stories, restricts narrative information to the eye of a character, allowing the audience limited perception for a particular effect. This paper briefly describes the work in narrative theories on focalization and our computational model of focalization in narrative generation using an Artificial Intelligence planning-based approach. Keys to the story generation with focalization are the use of distinctive knowledge (i.e., distinctive plan libraries) and the concept of focalizing factors for each focal character in the story.