This section of the Wiki will support my virtual humans work and research.

• Virtual Humans Thoughts and Readings
• http://www.virtualhumans.ai - the web site that supports my new book on Virtual Humans
• Halo Test-bed Development - notes on developing my virtual human test-bed, Halo
• My Daden website page which offers a product/service perspective on what I do is at https://www.daden.co.uk/virtual-humans

Here are links to some of my more recent non-project related virtual humans writings:

• Military Applications of Conversational AI - free white paper
• Virtual Humans - my original 2019 book

And here are some of my older papers and articles:

• VIOLA: Concept of a New Cognitive Framework to Enhance the Capabilities of Interactive Service Robots using Virtual Worlds
• A Model of Motivation for Virtual-Worlds Avatars
• Emotionally Responsive Robotic Avatars as Characters in Virtual Worlds
• Enhancing characters for virtual worlds and interactive environments through human-like enhancements
• Deploying Embodied AI into Virtual Worlds
• tedxbrum-burden_v2.pdf - Birmingham TEDx - Digital Immortality presentation
• Digital Immortality and Virtual Humans
• The Ethics and Impact of Digital Immortality
• 1909brumaidigitalimmortality.pdf - Digital Immortality presentation for BrumAI
• From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife - Guest blog post on the Aura digital afterlife site
• Virtual Humans – Should we be concerned? An interview with David Burden - podcast interview
• An AI Landscape - What do you mean by AI?
• Three Major Challenges for Achieving Human-Like AI

And also, of course, the infamous Guardian article

Here's a quick summary of some of the chatbot projects I've been involved with, with links to published papers etc where available. Quite a lot were for MOD so some information is limited.

• Customer support chatbot for Hanover Housing
• Virtual Libraries for Wolverhampton University, Staffordshire University, UEL
• Virtual Newsreader for Hull Telegraph
• Virtual Sheikh Bin-Bayyah - chatbot of a leading moderate Moslem cleric to help get is message a across to a younger Arabic audience (we were in Cairo a month before the Arab Spring revolution!)
• 3D virtual tour guides for the HBMeU eUniversity in Dubai, and the Virtual Library of Birmingham
• Use of Chatbots by the Military - Revealed: the MoD's secret cyberwarfare programme - courtesy of The Guardian!
• Anonymous Intimacy - 'It's Almost like Talking to a Person': Student Disclosure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Settings
• Covert Turing Tests - Covert Implementations of the Turing Test: A More Level Playing Field? - actually covers an MOD project and an earlier one with Loyola Marymount University
• Newspeak Twitter Bot - converted Trump, Johnson and other Twitter posts into Newspeak - for Wolverhampton Literary Festival
• Virtual Tutors - An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Using Pedagogical Agents for Teaching in Inclusive Ways
• Virtual Mentors and Virtual Personas - CogX Talk (video). Also picked up in the Heads Together story in the RAF Stories from the Future FICINT.
• Reflexive chatbots - based initially on DeBono's 6 Hats model, but now more generic, used on two MOD projects so far
• Virtual Synthetic wraps - creating virtual Twitter-type social media users to support virtual exercises and turn-based wargames - paper at ITEC2022.

Of course what a chatbot looks like is nothing whatsoever to do with how capable (or not) it is (just ask Sophia), but here are some images of my favourite chatbots we've worked on.

My Halo testbed bot in Second Life - reacting to a snake

A virtual life coach implemented as a mobile chat app

The Bin Bayyah chatbot - doing an Arabic chatbot is non-trivial

A virtual librarian for UEL

A virtual tour guide for the HBMeu virtual campus

The Newspeak Twitter bot