So a couple days ago I sent off the final draft of a paper on Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities to the Handbook of Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics. Tonight I heard back from the publisher: they have everything that they need, and our paper should be published as part of the Handbook … in early 2010.
"Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" reports work on emotional agents supervised by my old professor Ashwin Ram at the Cognitive Computing Lab. He’s been working on emotional robotics for over a decade, and it was in his lab that I developed my conviction that emotions serve a functional role in agents, and that to develop an emotional agent you should not start with trying to fake the desired behavior, but instead by analyzing psychological models of emotion and then using those findings to design models for agent control that will produce that behavior "naturally". This paper explains that approach and provides two examples of it in practice: the first was work done by myself on agents that learn from emotional events, and the second was work by Manish Mehta on making the personalities of more agents stay stable even after learning.
The takehome, however, is that this is the first scientific paper that I’ve gotten published in the past seven years, and one of the few where I was actually the lead author (though certainly the paper wouldn’t have happened without the hard work and guidance of my coauthors). Here’s hoping this is the first of many more!
-the Centaur
