Dear colleagues,

below two announcements of books that have just appeared and that you might
be interested in:
"Imitation in Animals and Artifacts" and
"Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots"

best regards, Kerstin Dautenhahn

---------------

1) "Imitation in Animals and Artifacts"
Editors: Kerstin Dautenhahn, Chrystopher Nehaniv
MIT Press, 2002

List of Contents:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/ASRG/AnArt.html
Ordering: http://mitpress.mit.edu/ or Amazon

Book Description:
The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals
draws on fields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence,
computer science, comparative psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and
linguistics. This volume represents a first step toward integrating
research from those studying imitation in humans and other animals, and
those studying imitation through the construction of computer software and
robots.
Imitation is of particular importance in enabling robotic or software
agents to share skills without the intervention of a programmer and in the
more general context of interaction and collaboration between software
agents and humans. Imitation provides a way for the agent—-whether
biological or artificial--to establish a “social relationship” and learn
about the demonstrator’s actions, in order to include them in its own
behavioral repertoire. Building robots and software agents that can imitate
other artificial or human agents in an appropriate way involves complex
problems of perception, experience, context, and action, solved in nature
in various ways by animals that imitate.


2) "Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships with Computers and
Robots",
Editors: Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Cañamero and Bruce Edmonds
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002

Table of Contents:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqlc/SIAbook_contents.pdf

Ordering:
http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/1-4020-7057-8 or Amazon

Book Description:
The field of Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) is a fast growing and
increasingly important area that comprises highly active research
activities and strongly interdisciplinary approaches. SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT
AGENTS, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Cañamero and Bruce
Edmonds, emerged from the AAAI Symposium “Socially Intelligent Agents - The
Human in the Loop”. The book provides 32 chapters, written by leading SIA
researchers, addressing topics such as: social robotics, embodied
conversational agents, affective computing, anthropomorphism, narrative and
story-telling, social aspects in multi-agent systems, new technologies for
education and therapy, and more. This breadth of topics covered in SOCIALLY
INTELLIGENT AGENTS provides the reader with a comprehensive look at current
research activities in the area. SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT AGENTS serves as an
excellent reference for a wide readership, e.g. computer scientists,
roboticists, web programmers and designers, computer users, cognitive
scientists, and other researchers interested in the study of how humans
relate to computers and robots, and how these agents in return can relate
to humans. This book is also suitable as research material in a variety of
advanced level courses, including Applied Artificial Intelligence,
Autonomous Agents, Human-Computer Interaction, Situated, Embodied AI.


-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn
Reader in Artificial Intelligence
Adaptive Systems Research Group
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/ASRG.html
The University of Hertfordshire, Department of Computer Science
College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, United Kingdom
URL: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Fax: +44-1707-284-303 Tel: +44-1707-284-333