Nader Hanna

Nader Hanna
Macquarie University · Department of Computing

PhD

About

37
Publications
7,026
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296
Citations

Publications

Publications (37)
Article
Full-text available
Effective communication in task-oriented situations requires high-level interactions. For human–agent collaboration, tasks need to be coordinated in a way that ensures mutual understanding. Speech Act Theory (SAT) aims to understand how utterances can be used to achieve actions. SAT consists of three components: locutionary act, illocutionary act,...
Article
Full-text available
There is an increasing interest in the use of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to work in teams with humans. To achieve successful outcomes for these heterogeneous teams, many of the aspects found in successful human teams will need to be supported. These aspects include behavioural (i.e., multimodal communication), cognitive (i.e., a shared menta...
Article
Dance has universally been used as a form of human expression for thousands of years. This common human behaviour and communication method has not been explored much in the context of computer-based technology, even within the field of virtual human research. This paper presents an experimental study investigating the impact of watching dancing vir...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
As Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) have been widely used for applications that require human interaction and collaboration, modeling an IVA that can exhibit personalities is becoming increasingly important. A large body of research has studied variant verbal and non-verbal aspects that are used to deduce an IVA’s personality; however, research fa...
Conference Paper
The development of a Shared Mental Model (SMM) between team members and effecti'e communication of the shared knowledge have been ftwnd to improve teamwork perfiwtnance. However, humans may differ in how they produce and perceive communication acts according to their personality traits and this will affect development of the SMM. Whether, this is t...
Article
This paper presents an experimental study investigating the impact of dancing IVAs on human emotions. The results showed that watching a dancing IVA depicting different emotions significantly influenced human emotions. Additionally, the participant's anger, sadness and happiness were significantly dependent on which dancing character's emotion they...
Chapter
Full-text available
Increasing interest in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) in different applications has imposed new requirements on the design of the CVEs and the resident Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). In addition to cognitive abilities, IVAs in CVEs require social and communication behaviours. The use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) has been a successfu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
With the varied use of games, the need to measure player's involvement has become prominent. Several studies aimed to quantify users' involvement. However, none of these studies presented a robust framework to measure the player's involvement in games nor considered player types as a factor. In this paper, a framework to quantify automatically the...
Conference Paper
The last decade has seen an increasing interest in the use of 3D virtual environments for educational applications. However, very few studies investigated the influence of the learning context, such as class type and learning type, on learners’ academic performance. This paper studied the impact of class type (i.e. comprehensive or selective) class...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
As a consequence of the increasing interest in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) and the complex nature of such systems, the need for a thorough evaluation framework has become necessary. The current evaluation frameworks suffer from limitations in assessment because they are either confined to evaluation of a specific type of CVE or they f...
Conference Paper
There is a growing interest in the use of heterogeneous teams comprised of humans and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). Human teamwork studies have provided cumulative knowledge about team features and performance; however, transfer of this knowledge to human-IVA teams is challenging. Novelly, this paper investigates the impact of multiple communi...
Conference Paper
The growing interest in using Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) increases the need to create heterogeneous teams comprised of humans and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). The main aim of my PhD is to study the factors that tend to improve team performance and foster collaboration between humans and IVAs in CVEs. To reach this aim, a framew...
Conference Paper
It is well known that the development of a Shared Mental Model (SMM) leads to better teamwork performance. Communication of shared knowledge is considered a crucial factor in successful teamwork. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of applying a proposed Human-Agent Teamwork Communication Model, namely HAT-CoM, on the development of SMM between h...
Conference Paper
Communication between collaborating virtual agents and humans is a challenging activity as it can take many forms and requires situation awareness, planning and replanning. In this paper we present the Human-Agent Teamwork Communication (HAT-COM) model and scenario that have been integrated into a collaborative virtual learning environment for eval...
Conference Paper
Evaluation is an essential step in the research and development of software, particularly for new technologies such as Virtual Environments. One of the challenges to such evaluation is to collect data needed for analyzing the behavior of the users of the virtual environment. Conventional acquisition of evaluation data is time-consuming and prone to...
Conference Paper
Virtual Learning Environments are increasingly used in education to encourage collaborative learning and engagement with the learning material. However, collaborative activity is often minimal and superficial. We propose a multi-agent collaborative virtual learning environment in which the agents support communication skills and collaboration among...
Conference Paper
Designing a virtual agent architecture that comprises collaboration between the agents and human users remains a challenging issue due to differences in beliefs, ways of reasoning and the abilities used to achieve the common goal. Allowing the agent and human to communicate verbally and non-verbally while achieving the collaborative task, further i...
Conference Paper
This paper presents the intelligent virtual animals that inhabit Omosa, a virtual learning environment to help secondary school students learn how to conduct scientific inquiry and gain concepts from biology. Omosa supports multiple agents, including animals, plants, and human hunters, which live in groups of varying sizes and in a predator-prey re...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We have developed the virtual world of Omosa in which school students can learn what scientists do by doing it themselves. In Omosa students are able to observe, collect data and interact with a number of intelligent virtual human and animal agents.
Conference Paper
Automatic hepatic tumor segmentation is a crucial step for diagnosis and surgery planning. This paper presents a new fully automatic technique to segment the tumors in liver structure with no interaction from user. Contrast enhancement is applied to the slices of segmented liver, then adding each image to itself to have a white image with some pepp...
Conference Paper
The liver is a common site for the occurrence of tumors. Automatic hepatic lesion segmentation is a crucial step for diagnosis and surgery planning. This paper presents a new fully automatic technique to segment the tumors in liver structure with no interaction from user. Contrast enhancement is applied to the slices of segmented liver, then adding...
Article
Liver cancer causes the majority of primary malignant liver tumors among adults. Computed Tomography (CT) scans are generally used to make the treatment plan or to prepare for ablation surgery. Processing CT image includes the automatic diagnosis of liver pathologies, such as detecting lesions and following vessels ramification, and 3D volume rende...
Conference Paper
As a mean for liver investigation, abdominal CT images have been widely studied in the recent years. Processing CT image includes the automatic diagnosis of liver pathologies, such as detecting lesions and following vessels ramification, and its 3D volume rendering. The first step in all these studies is the automatic liver segmentation. This paper...

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