Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are not only useful for creating plausible behaviors for interactive game elements, but also for the analysis of the players to provide a better gaming environment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for automatic classification of player complaints in a social gaming platform. We use features that describe both parties of the complaint (namely, the accuser and the suspect), as well as interaction features of the game itself. The proposed classification approach, based on gradient boosting machines, is tested on the COPA Database of 100 000 unique users and 800 000 individual games. We advance the state of the art in this challenging problem.

Xface is a set of open source tools for creation of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) using MPEG4 and keyframe based rendering driven by SMIL-Agent scripting language. Xface Toolkit, coupled with SMIL-Agent scripting serves as a full 3D facial animation authoring package. Xface project is initiated by Cognitive and Communication Technologies (TCC) division of FBK-irst (formerly ITC-irst). The toolkit is written in ANSI C++, and is open source and platform independent.

In this paper, XfaceEd, our open source, platform independent tool for authoring 3D embodied conversational agents (ECAs) is presented. Following MPEG-4 Facial Animation (FA) standard, XfaceEd provides an easy to use interface to generate MPEG-4 ready ECAs from static 3D models. Users can set MPEG-4 Facial Definition Points (FDP) and Facial Animation Parameter Units (FAPU), define the zone of influence of each feature point and how this influence is propagated among the neighboring vertices. As an alternative to MPEG-4, one can also specify morph targets for different categories such as visemes, emotions and expressions, in order to achieve facial animation using the keyframe interpolation technique. Morph targets from different categories are blended to create more lifelike behaviour.Results can be previewed and parameters can be tweaked real time within the application for fine tuning. Changes made take into effect immediately, which in turn ensures rapid production. The final output is a configuration file XML format and can be interpreted by XfacePlayer or other applications for easy authoring of embodied conversational agents for multimodal environments.

Synthetic characters are an effective modality to convey messages to the user, provide visual feedback about the system internal understanding of the communication, and engage the user in the dialogue through emotional involvement. In this paper we argue for a fine-grain distinction of the expressive capabilities of synthetic agents: avatars should not be considered as an indivisible modality but as the synergic contribution of different communication channels that, properly synchronized, generate an overall communication performance. In this view, we propose SMIL-AGENT as a representation and scripting language for synthetic characters, which abstracts away from the specific implementation and context of use of the character. SMIL-AGENT has been defined starting from SMIL 0.1 standard specification and aims at providing a high-level standardized language for presentations by different synthetic agents within diverse communication and application contexts.

In this paper, we present our open source, platform independent toolkit for developing 3D talking agents, namely Xface. It relies on MPEG-4 Face Animation (FA) standard. The toolkit currently incorporates three pieces of software. The core Xface library is for developers who want to embed 3D facial animation to their software as well as researchers who want to focus on related topics without the hassle of implementing a full framework from scratch. XfaceEd editor provides an easy to use interface to generate MPEG-4 ready meshes from static 3D models. Last, XfacePlayer is a sample application that demonstrates the toolkit in action. All the pieces are implemented in C++ programming language and rely on only operating system independent libraries. The main design principles for Xface are ease of use and extendibility.