Our immersive simulations of real-life social communication based on interactive 3D video games involving spoken dialogs and cultural protocols with "socially intelligent virtual humans" are built upon these pedagogic and technologic innovations:

Interactive, immersive social simulations with "socially intelligent virtual humans"

Our immersive, interactive 3D video games simulate real-life communication, allowing users to role play with animated "socially intelligent virtual humans" that recognize and respond to the user's speech, intent, gestures and behavior.

We promote extensive levels of engagement, motivation and practice by providing "free form" storylines with very wide ranges of game-play paths, interactive dialogs and action options. For instance, in our Mission to Iraq language course if the user speaks and behaves correctly, the virtual Iraqis become trustful and cooperative, and provide information that users need to advance. Otherwise, the virtual Iraqis are uncooperative and prevent learners from "winning" the game.

Our Cultural Puppets™ technology drives virtual humans to exhibit behavior that is appropriate to the simulation's contexts of storyline, culture, task, user actions, and the personality, emotions and intent specific to each virtual human. User communication towards virtual humans might elicit different responses. For example, in one scene in the Mission to Iraq course, the user's disrespect towards two virtual Iraqis elicits a passive response from one and insults from the other.

Cultural protocols involve cultural knowledge, sensitivity and awareness — including non-verbal gestures, etiquette, and norms of politeness — that are critical for successful communication. In another scene of the Mission to Iraq course, the user can speak perfect Arabic and still offend his virtual Iraqi host by not asking him to enter the house first or by later talking to his wife without observing Iraqi cultural protocols.

Our automated speech recognizer is optimized to understand native and non-native speakers of the language. It tolerates pronunciation errors while supporting pronunciation training.

Intelligent tutoring systems

We guide our work by adoption-based research in the learning sciences, which is predicated upon and contributes to the successful adoption of effective learning systems. We use our learning and simulation platforms as both versatile and evolving content delivery systems, and testbeds for evaluation of new learning methods. We continually collect data from field use of our learning systems, analyze the data, publish evaluation results, and use the results to inform further research and development.

Game-based learning is an important new area for intelligent learning environments, and we are at the forefront of this trend.

We are also playing a leading role in the development of pedagogical agents, which are animated agents that promote learning by interacting with learners at both cognitive and affective levels. For example, we continue to conduct fundamental research on the politeness effect, whereby learning systems that adhere to social norms of politeness in human-computer interaction promote better learning than learning systems that violate those norms. These principles guide the behavior of the virtual tutors and socially intelligent virtual humans in our intelligent tutoring systems.

Our studies show that the manner in which systems provide tutorial feedback has an effect on learning outcomes. Feedback that is encouraging and sensitive to the learner's sense of self-esteem leads to better learning than simply telling learners when their responses are right or wrong.

Corrective feedback is most effective when it is embedded in the game, instead of being in tutorial critiques. For example, if the learner inadvertently is rude to a virtual Iraqi in the Mission to Iraq course, he may call the learner a "son of a dog". This very effectively gets the learner's attention without damaging the learner's self-esteem.

Artificial intelligence

Our advanced artificial-intelligence technologies enhance every aspect of our interactive simulations.
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Putting it all together

Our Alelo Technology products enable quick and economic publishing of simulations that incorporate our social-communication technologic and pedagogic innovations.
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