For the first time, a comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters. The text introduces toolkits for authoring animated characters which further supports the practicality and ease of use of this new interface technology. As life-like characters is a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. The text covers the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second Australasian Conference on Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence, ACALCI 2016, held in Canberra, ACT, Australia, in February 2016. The 30 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: mathematical modeling and theory; learning and optimization; planning and scheduling; feature selection; and applications and games.

Table of contents

While assimilating theoretical insights from Aristotle to this day, this title contests, inter alia, the theory of comedy's ritual origin; challenges the age-old and continuing attempts to determine the structure of action that characterises comedy; and, suggests instead that structures of action are shared by all genres.

Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys today ́s diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the strategies of their representation and characterization, the psychology of their reception, as well as their specific forms and constellations in - and across - different media, from the book to the internet.

have great pleasure in writing this foreword to Dr. Latane’s book on the Novels of William Boyd. The book is a significant contribution to Boyd criticism. It has discussed the early, the middle and the last phase of Boyd’s novels. In doing if the author has defined the totality of Boyd’s vision. Indeed every novel is a part of this totality and the totality is more than a mere sum of the novels. The reciprocal relationship between the part and the whole is the crux of novel-criticism and the book has given due justice to this aspect. Another important feature of the book is the analysis of the postmodernist element in Boyd’s novels. This critical framework can be used to analysis the postmodernist element in the contemporary Indian novel in English. Even going further it can be used to analyse the Postmodernist element in the contemporary Marathi novel. A thesis is really acknowledged when it become a source material for the future researchers and comparatives. Mr. Latane’s book has that potential. I heartily wish a good reception to the book. Dr. Prakash Deshpande Kejkar Former Professor of English Shivaji University, Kolhapur

In addition to presenting the latest work in the field, Artificial Life V includes a retrospective and prospective look at both artificial and natural life with the aim of refining the methods and approaches discovered so far into viable, practical tools for the pursuit of science and engineering goals. May 16-18, 1996 · Nara, Japan Despite all the successes in computer engineering, adaptive computation, bottom-up AI, and robotics, Artificial Life must not become simply a one-way bridge, borrowing biological principles to enhance our engineering efforts in the construction of life-as-it-could-be. We must ensure that we give back to biology in kind, by developing tools and methods that will be of real value in the effort to understand life-as-it-is. Artificial Life V marks a decade since Christopher Langton organized the first workshop on artificial life--a decade characterized by the exploration of new possibilities and techniques as researchers have sought to understand, through synthetic experiments, the organizing principles underlying the dynamics (usually the nonlinear dynamics) of living systems. In addition to presenting the latest work in the field, Artificial Life V includes a retrospective and prospective look at both artificial and natural life with the aim of refining the methods and approaches discovered so far into viable, practical tools for the pursuit of science and engineering goals. Complex Adaptive Systems series

These arethe proceedingsof the Fourth InternationalWorkshopon Cooperative Information Agents, held in Boston Massachusetts, USA, July 7-9, 2000. Cooperative information agent research and development focused originally onaccessingmultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributedinformationsources. Ga- ingaccesstothesesystems,throughInternetsearchengines,applicationprogram interfaces, wrappers, and web-based screens has been an important focus of - operative intelligent agents. Research has also focused on the integration of this information into a coherent model that combined data and knowledge from the multiple sources. Finally, this information is disseminated to a wide audience, giving rise to issues such as data quality, information pedigree, source reliability, information security, personal privacy, and information value. Research in - operative information agents has expanded to include agent negotiation, agent communities, agent mobility, as well as agent collaboration for information d- covery in constrained environments. TheinterdisciplinaryCIAworkshopseriesencompassesa widevarietyoft- ics dealing with cooperative information agents. All workshop proceedings have been published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence, Volumes 1202 (1997), 1435 (1998), and 1652 (1999), respectively. This year, the theme of the CIA workshop was ”’The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace”, a very ?tting topic as the use of agents for information gathering, negotiation, correlation, fusion, and dissemination becomes ever more prevalent. We noted a marked trend in CIA 2000 towards addressing issues related to communities of agents that: (1) negotiate for information resources, (2) build robust ontologies to enhance search capabilities, (3) communicate for planning and problem so- ing, (4) learn and evolve based on their experiences, and (5) assume increasing degrees of autonomy in the control of complex systems.

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