Welcome to Companions
COMPANIONS aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'.
This will be an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes. It will communicate with the user primarily by using and understanding speech, but also using other technologies such as touch screens and sensors.
The project is led by Professor Yorick Wilks of the University of Sheffield and consists of a consortium of 14 partners from across Europe and the US. The European Commission is funding the project as part of its 6th Research Framework, specifically as part of its focus on Information Society Technologies.
Building Companions
Companions Research brings together experts in a range of cutting edge technologies including dialogue management, speech recognition and synthesis, embodied conversational agents, and human-computer interaction.
Being with Companions
The Companions Demonstrators will show off the capabilities of the technology, and a number of components or modules that future research and products can build on to create a variety of Companions.
Companions people: Paris meeting photos available on Flickr
Companions Talk
Yorick Wilks: Companions and Identity
Yorick Wilks: Emily and the end of the 'uncanny valley'? 'There seems no general agreement about the existence of the phenomenon: that robots, as they become every closer to us in performance, will reach a close point where suddely they will seem more distant (because of the very close similarity). Emily has been much touted as the best candidate yet, from Image Metrics of Manchester.'
Yorick Wilks: Scholarly treatment of legal issues in a Lifelogging Companion
Yorick Wilks: What a poet thought of 40 years ahead of the rest of us
Yorick Wilks: Strange mildly-companionish trial search site from MS
Yorick Wilks: Hear an interview with the founder of the Virtual Persona project in the US: The VIRSONA project
Christopher Brewster: Advance In Image Recognition Software (story from Slashdot)
David Benyon: The sense of presence is, arguably, an important characteristic of companions: Presence and Companions
Companions News and Events
Papers and presentations now available for the Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation (Bellagio, 6-7 October 2008).
Yorick Wilks was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics' Lifetime Achievement Award at its 43rd annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio, on 18 June 2008. Read the acceptance speech: On Whose Shoulders? (pdf, 120kb)
Zampolli Prize for Yorick Wilks: On 28 May Professor Yorick Wilks was awarded the 2008 biennial Zampolli Prize for 'Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation within Human Language Technologies' by the European Language Development Association. He delivered his prize lecture at LREC-08 in Marrakech.
Yorick Wilks Slides (pdf, 1.2Mb): In my beginning is my end: reflections on 45 years of NLP and corpora
Press: Listen to Yorick Wilks on the Today Programme (BBC Radio 4) 6 June 2008: Robots designed to act as carers
Publications: More 2008 publications now available!
New Demonstrator: Discussing photos with the Senior Companion (YouTube)
Funding
European Commission Sixth Framework Programme
Information Society Technologies Integrated Project IST-34434
Updated: 13 November 2008 14:32 PM