Small or medium-scale focused research project (STREP) proposal
ICT Call 3
FP7-ICT-2007-3
Authoring and Directing Real-time InterActive New-media

ADRIAN

Small or medium scale focused research project (STREP)
Date of preparation: 4 april 2008
Version number (optional): 01

Work programme topic addressed 
(if more than one, indicate their order of importance to the project. The main (first) objective must be one included in this call)
(a) Advanced Authoring 

Name of the coordinating person: Vincenzo Lombardo
e-mail: vincenzo@vrmmp.it
fax: 011-5697239

Participant no. *	Participant organisation name	Part. short name	Country	
1 (Coordinator)	Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park	VRMMP	Italy	
2	Università di Torino	UniTO	Italy	
3				
4				
5				
3				

*Please use the same participant numbering as that used in Proposal submission forms A2

Proposal abstract [max 2000 characters, now 2765 characters]
(copied from Part A, if not in English include an English translation)

New storytelling-based media is increasingly more important part of narrative enterprise today. However, many innovations of such new media, such as interactivity with the user, conflict with the authorial control over story advancement. As a consequence, success cases of interactive storytelling are limited to video games, where narration is very limited.

The ADRIAN project differs from existing, mostly plot-based, approaches by providing a character-centered perspective on the storytelling process. Although we believe that the authoring support along the plot dimension is desirable, we claim that it is premature to provide authors with diagrammatic structures they are not familiar with and we aim at providing a support based on a semi-formal model oriented to characters’ behaviours and changes within a story.

In order to achieve this, we will determine a number of basic character traits; these traits will be conceived by taking into account the requirement of the narrative advancements, such as the level of determination or closeness to reaching her/his goal; then we develop an appropriate level of complexity description language and reasoning framework. These will be used in authoring tools for managing the complexity of potential encounters of characters in a scene. The system will be able to reason about potential behaviours of each character, based on the current traits and suggest possible next steps for story advancement.

The approach and authoring environment will be developed closely in conjunction with and evaluated in the facilities of the production partners. The solutions provided by the environment will support authors in finding credible story advancements though the user’s interventions through interactivity.

ADRIAN will provide high-level authoring support for cross-platform, storytelling-based media productions. It will support linear and interactive narratives on different platforms, such as games, TV programs and web sites.

Table of contents

Section 1: Scientific and/or technical quality, relevant to the topics addressed by the call 
(Recommended length for the whole of Section 1 – twenty pages not including the Gantt chart, Pert diagram or tables 1.3a-e)

1.1	Concept and objectives [8/10 pages, now 5]
Explain the concept of your project. What are the main ideas that led you to propose this work?
Describe in detail the S&T objectives. Show how they relate to the topics addressed by the call, which you should explicitly identify. The objectives should be those achievable within the project, not through subsequent development. They should be stated in a measurable and verifiable form, including through the milestones that will be indicated under section 1.3 below.

[Explain the concept of your project.]

The ADRIAN project is about providing high-level support for storytelling-based media production. The goal is to implement a software tool that can support authors in the storytelling process by assuming a character-centred perspective. Characters are the “flesh and blood” of a story (compare it with the abstractness of the plot diagram): it is the characters’ emotional state that becomes unbalanced at the beginning of a story, it is the characters’ values that are put at stake to make the story proceed, and it is the characters who make a story advance through their behaviour within the local situations during the story development. The authoring support tools will therefore be built upon a model of the characters’ traits that are relevant in the narrative realm.  It will implement a reasoning framework over such traits to suggest characters’ behaviours to the author that are plausible for the state of affairs in a scene.  In order to make the tool user-friendly for the author, it will be equipped with a feature selection based graphical interface, that the author can use to build characters from a basic set of traits.  [Can we cite a selection of Psychology/Cognitive Science on character traits?]

ADRIAN departs from previous plot-driven approaches to the support of storytelling by providing a character-centred perspective that is more meaningful to the author. This perspective is common to both traditional and interactive storytelling, and allows the sharing of characters’ notions at a conceptual as well as the implementation level.  The ADRIAN project approach is not to try to be comprehensive in the support of the storytelling process, but to only address the character part of the whole, leaving plot, events, time, and space for further work. 

[What are the main ideas that led you to propose this work?]

The requirement for a tool such as the one proposed in the ADRIAN project arises from two considerations: the first is that there is a general growing interest for storytelling-based media and several attempts to produce linear and interactive stories for the digital media, so there is a need for supporting authors in conceiving believable stories; the second is that the models proposed to support the creation of stories in digital media, which include interactivity, seem to rely more upon abstract schemata derived from computer science practice than the storytelling author’s practice.  We address these two issues in the next sections. 

Growing interest for storytelling-based media

Interactive storytelling- (or drama-, narrative-) based media (Esslin 1987), which involve characters performing live actions according to some plot, are becoming increasingly more pervasive. Examples include widely distributed media products, such as role-playing games (referring to Dungeons and Dragons paradigm, 1974) and virtual assistants’ adaptive presentations (e.g., Carletto the spider (Damiano et al. 2006, in press)), as well as experimental projects, such as interactive fictional TV series (e.g., Accidental Lovers from Finnish TV within NM2 project), cinema movies used as an interface (e.g., Late fragments from National Film Board of Canada), and interactive drama (e.g., Façade (Mateas, Stern 2003), http://www.interactivestory.net). 

All these projects refer to very different products, though the storytelling enterprise can be much wider. (Ryan 2006) classifies four types of approaches to digital narrative: the practical approach, the metaphorical approach, the expansionist approach, and the traditionalist approach.

The practical approach accounts for keeping and disseminating personal stories (stories from people’s lives) not controlled by a professional author; its typical usage is for preservation of cultural memories or for education purposes.  The metaphorical approach seeks inspiration from narrative concepts to develop computer applications that aim at producing an engaging communication with the users through the use of a narrative interface; these are typically simplistic narrative scenarios that are useful for presenting some non familiar environment to novices. In these two approaches the requirements to the storytelling part are not compelling, and standard software environments are enough to cope with the development issues. 

The expansionist approach challenges the traditional categories set up since Aristotle of stories in a fixed sequence, with a definite beginning and ending and a strong unity of action through a plot, a characterization, and a setting, by considering narrative mutable under the influences from culture, epoch and technological innovations. This approach would typically accommodate interactivity into linear plot, though it is hard to accept stories with iteration, fuzzy logic control and open structures; in these cases we have an avant-garde form of writing practice that seems far from storytelling. Finally, the traditionalist approach pursues a more difficult goal of “fulfilling the relatively rigid demands of narrative form and meaning” (Ryan 2006, p. xvii).

The examples mentioned above {which examples?] are only a few examples of the traditionalist approach, with scholars and developers perfectly aware that current results cannot compete with the productivity of traditional media, such as film, drama or literature.  Here the Aristotelian poetics holds to a great extent, with authors that try to deal with interactivity within the limits offered by the plot.  In Accidental lovers the control offered to the audience is to suggest possible evolutions of the story in a TV series where the protagonists are two odd lovers (a very young guy and an old woman); Carletto the spider, is a dramatic guide that organizes a monologue about a historical site according to a structure that is built in real time following the motion of the visitors; Late fragments is an interactive film with three independent storylines on three different characters, and the viewer can click anywhere on the screen to jump across storylines or to focus on a specific storyline of interest; Façade is an interactive drama where the spectator is a character participating in a drama with other two characters through a natural language and limited gestural interface, with a plot that forces the two controlled characters to behave in ways that lead to an end.

Support to the creation of stories

The support to the creation of stories has been a particularly flourishing applied research area, which has produced a number of approaches to the authoring of linear stories (especially for the audiovisual industry). These paradigms of traditional storytelling, elaborated by the so-called “gurus” of successful writing, address the issues that are typically involved in a story. These were firstly set by Aristotle after an analysis of a number of tragedies. He conceived of six elements of drama arranged in the order of relevance:
1.	PLOT – what happens in a play; the order of events, what happens rather than what it means;
2.	THEME – what the play means as opposed to what happens (plot); the main idea within the play;
3.	CHARACTER – the personality or the part an actor represents in a play;
4.	LANGUAGE/DIALOGUE – the word choices made by the playwright and the enunciation of the actors delivering the lines;
5.	MUSIC/RHYTHM –sound, rhythm and melody of the speeches;
6.	SPECTACLE – visual elements of the production of a play (scenery, costumes, and special effects).
So, plot is a notion established as fundamental by Aristotle. Aristotle conceived the action, or plot, of a play as of far greater importance than the characters. This conception he gained from the plays of the time, which, in general, centred around a personified passion rather than a character. Action was constrained by unity, which limits it to a single set of incidents which are related as cause and effect, "having a beginning, a middle, and an end." Other unities concerned time (limited duration) and place (locality constraint).
So, he insisted very clearly that in tragedy the plot does not rise out of the characters, but on the contrary the plot tests the characters through the working-out of destiny -- "blind fate." Character comes in as subsidiary to the action. So, the drama interests us, not predominantly by its depiction of human nature, but primarily by the situations and only secondarily by the feelings of those therein involved. 

This Aristotelian approach has been “corrected” by modern research towards an increased attention on characters, and then assumed by the widely acknowledged present day paradigms of linear storytelling. Two scholars have been fundamental for this “correction”: Egri and Campbell. Lajos Egri (1946) assigned the character a paramount role in direct dependence of the story premise, that in turn defines the story goal. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the premise can be that “Great love defies all, even death”, while in Othello, it can be “Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love” (italics from Egri). Characters are “… the fundamental material we are forced to work with, so we must know character as thoroughly as possible” (Egri, p. 32), regardless of the medium we are working. Characters, for being well written, must undergo a basic change; all “characters move relentlessly from one state of mind toward another; they are forced to change, grow, develop … “ (Egri, p. 62). 
Joseph Campbell (1949) developed his theory of “monomyth” by exploiting Jung’s archetipal approach to human psychology. His theory, also known as the “hero’s journey”, provides an excellent toolbox for creating a story around some character, the hero, that presents him/her-self with a “thousand faces” in the history of the human kind. The hero’s journey model is an abstraction that provides a schema for a story that would certainly appeal on everyone. The hero is first introduced in his/her ordinary world, where he receives the call to an adventure that would lead him/(her) achieve a great gift - the goal or "boon" - which often results in important self-knowledge. He is reluctant at first but can be encouraged by a wise old man or woman to enter the adventure, where he must survive a number of challenges, which he faces alone or with helpers, until the most severe challenge that lets him achieve the “boon” (and is often challenged again on the road back to his/her world). He is transformed by this experience and, if his/her return succeeds, his/her world will benefit from the “boon”. 
Present paradigms of storytelling (developed by the so-called “gurus” of screenwriting) strongly rely on these character-based contributions (Dramatica, Field 2003; Hauge, Vogler, & Mefford 2003, McKee 1999; Seger 1984, 1990, 2003, Truby 2007, Vogler 1998). The notions of character storylines, main character perspective, and character change accompany the notion of plot structure in these paradigms. The character storyline is a sequence of events going from the beginning to the end of story, thus formed by a set of interrelated storylines; paradigms prescribe the presence of more than one essential storylines in a story (two to four), with different meanings and mostly involving the notion of conflict in the interrelations of storylines. The main character, also known as hero or protagonist, is the character who undergoes the major changes in a story and providing one of the fundamental perspective on the story to the audience. Sometimes, man character and protagonist are not the same character, thus conveying multiple perspectives to the audience. Character change is the essential aspect of all theories and refers to the journey of the hero, who returns transformed; this is sometimes split into a growth and a resolve of the character, and traces a dramatic or transformation arc. Change is also the force that connects the character motivations with his/her actions to the goal: Seger speaks of a “character spine”, with transformations occurring at attitude, action and emotional levels of the character (resembling the cluster of attributes proposed by Egri for describing a character, physiological, sociological, psychological). 

Since most of the efforts of story paradigms have been in the direction of the movie industry, a few software tools exist to format screenwriting in ways that are suitable for subsequent shooting (see, e.g., Final Draft - http://www.finaldraft.com), Dramatica Pro (based on the Dramatica paradigm, which involves peculiarities in storylines, main character, character change) supports writers during story creation. It provides an interface for answering the questions posed by the Dramatica theory on the characters and the plot, and restricting the ways of telling a story to the one that best expresses the vision of the author. There are four stages: 
1. Story-forming allows the selection of a story-form that incorporates structural, thematic, and dynamic elements of the plot and the characters. This occurs through a selection of feature values (but a freer method of sketching the basic story exists too). For example, a character resolve output can be CHANGE (Rick in Casablanca) or STEADFAST (Laszlo in Casablanca). 
2. Story-encoding involves the symbols selected to illustrate a story. This is the process of developing scenarios and images to convey the underlying structure and dynamics of a story, i.e. a real world event that fulfills a dramatic function in the story (the function OBTAIN can be encoded as the event “inheriting a house”). The specific examples can concern the character arc, the story goal, the plot points, theme, and conflict. Dramatica allows to comparing the story scenes with examples of great writers. 
3. Story-weaving builds the order and emphasis used in presenting the story elements, so the PLOT. Here the author makes the many different story threads converge into a potentially unique tapestry, organized into Acts, Scenes, or Chapters. With this plot outline the author writes a first draft. 
4. Reception concerns the ways the audience interprets a finished story. This phase explores how a story impact is changed because of the personality of the audience. 
One appreciated aspect that is reported of Dramatica Pro is the opportunity for writer growth, because it allows the access to the major controls of the story in a concise form and this contributes to an improved awareness of the writer’s capabilities. Dramatica does not include any form of reasoning that allows to performing automatic steps into the story.  

[Support in the interactive storytelling]

The control of interactive storytelling production has been pursued in a few approaches, usually implemented into monolithic (commercial and open-source) tools that cover various aspects of storytelling-based media, e.g. cinematography or animation. In the case of storytelling authoring downright, the general orientation is to support the definition of the plot structure. 
Erasmatron [Crawford02] and its successor Storytron [Storytron] are focused in the creation of interactive stories. Their target is the gaming industry. In Erasmatron/Storytron the author defines a StoryWorld by assigning personality traits to non-player and player characters, defining their initial relationships, creating the milieu in which they interact, and designing the rules governing their interactions. A StoryWorld embeds multiple chains of events, with the indication of PlotPoints, that restrict the combination possibilities of action arrangements. It is possible to play the event chains of the StoryWorld several times to discover the problems in the story as well as to check the sequential chain through the “inclination equations” that constrain the characters’ reactions; however, the system does not go beyond the one-step in checking validity with respect to goals or length developing plans. Within a play session, the outcoming story is represented by the sequences of actions that have been executed. There is not a support for the validation of pre-defined stories, and, if during the execution of a story some condition fails, the system declares the story as "poisoned". It is up to the author to decide whether to check and fix the reason of the poisoning or leave the story as it is. Some author reports to have used ERASMATRON (Mixon 1996), though we can say it has never become popular among authors. 
Two recent EU projects have dealt with interactive storytelling environments. The NM2 project (http://www.ist-nm2.org), has provided a first systematization of storytelling forms along interactivity issues and production methods axes; the InScape project (http://www.inscapers.com) has defined a process method and a monolithic software tool that encompasses the overall production process of interactive stories through a story planner and editor, a stage editor, and a library of objects to be inserted into the stage, also including script programming capabilities. Here [Kafno07, Balet07], as in the case of Erasmatron above, the advancement of a story is based on the triggering of many event-reaction rules. The event can be related to an explicit action of the player or to one of the story elements. The reaction can be any of the possible actions of the story elements. A typical example is the use of proximity sensors. To check whether advancing or not in a story, a proximity sensor is placed at a certain key position. If the user reaches the proximity sensor it means that he was able to meet all the characters along a path (and in general to accomplish all the actions required) and we can advance with the story events. The reaction is then to setup the initial conditions for a new scene, such as update the state and position of the characters in the story.
This approach does not scale well with the number of elements in the story, and can lead the story to inconsistent states. This forces the authors to perform many successive refinements, test-and-trial, until no room for inconsistencies is apparently possible.

The tools mentioned here incorporate some action chaining rules in a story environment. The InScape tool is definitely oriented to explore a number of events in a world and inserting conditions for the story advancement, thus relying definitely upon the plot structure. Erasmatron involve characters but the complexity of traits as well as the reasoning abilities are very basic, with a control over the story elements that is not comparable with the linear tools such as Dramatica Pro. The definition of a character through a number of traits and rules for determining its behaviour is a specific realization of a semantic annotation to story elements with a reasoning framework that can take decisions over that description. 

Semantic annotation for media production
The narrative form is one of the aspects of media production that exploits ontology-based semantic annotation. In recent years a number of knowledge-based approaches to annotation of media assets for generating complex media. In the case of narrative (see state-of-the-art section below) is seems that the more knowledge is intensive the more complex a narrative we are able to generate. We can roughly talk of three forms of narrative: associative narrative, which only considers the relationships, in associative terms, over constituent units; template-based narrative, which takes into account the structure of a story, e.g. in the Aristotelian terms of beginning, middle and end, and tags units accordingly for usage within the structure that controls the story development; finally, story-based narrative, which exploits a story plan for organizing the material that will follow, possibly taking into account the characters actions as a consequence of previous choices. Associative narrative is best suited for interactive narratives where we have a scarce control of the author over the story development, such as the simplistic narrative scenarios classified by Ryan as “practical” or “metaphorical”; an example is the SOFT CINEMA system by Manovich. The template-based narrative approach can better address the requirements of “expansionist” and “traditional” categories, by working through tagging with individual attribute values or rules that calculate values to be assigned to units. Examples are the Agent Stories system (Brooks 1999) or the Disc systems (Geurts 2003), respectively. 
In the perspective of a character-based “traditional” approach to storytelling, however, only the story-based narrative form seems suitable for our concerns, since it merges story structure and domain knowledge, where the “flesh and blood” of story characters lies. Here we can find a number of different encodings of domain knowledge, from a coherence of the story with respect to a story planner that encodes characters intentions and implements characters as intelligent agents (Theune et al. 2003) to rhetorical and genre knowledge, such as the humour-oriented editing model Auteur (Nack 1996). 
In the ADRIAN project, with its perspective on character specification that can be spanned through stories and settings, we will refer to a trait-oriented domain ontology that will include the emotional status, actional library and normative knowledge of the characters (Damiano et al. 2005). We believe that the character specification is better represented through the reference to an upper level ontology (such as DOLCE), to favour interoperability through domains and multiple applications of character traits. Semantic annotation will be used in the application to characters rather than story segments, leaving the story domain oriented annotation of the plot structure for future terms. 
In the line of semantic annotation and story authoring through an implementation of characters as intelligent agents there is a productive, though a niche, area of artificial intelligence, that have addressed the forms of communication and entertainment, and has also developed storytelling authoring systems.

AI research in storytelling systems and authoring support 
A number of AI systems for communication and entertainment of the last decade have in common the use of artificial characters in storytelling frameworks. Such systems, that cover all the Ryan’s categories above, range from entertainment (Mateas-Stern:05, Pizzi-etal:2007) to education (Si-etal:2005, Aylett-etal:2007) and information presentation (Kopp-etal:05, Damiano-etal:06). Taking a different perspective with respect to the semantic annotation above, they can be classified as story-based or character-based systems. Story-based systems feature centralized architectures, in which the behaviour displayed by the system, not necessarily through the medium of characters, is driven by the unifying principle of a story; the (interactive) story is usually underspecified in order to implement non-determinism and interactivity. Character-based systems rely on characters as a way to create interactions, which take the form of an emergent narrative; the story to be conveyed is usually specified in terms of the roles played by the characters, accompanied by an initial configuration in which the different characters' beliefs and goals conflict. In both cases, gaining the engagement of the user is postulated as a consequence of the system's ability to constrain the characters' behaviour in terms of a story, a feature that is normally put in relation with an emotional dimension.

In the perspective of authorial support, the major difference of the approaches results in the specification of the drama direction. The direction can be strictly specified as to identify a well circumscribed subset of plots, thus privileging the authorial control with respect to the user freedom in interaction, or left underdetermined, with a larger set of different plot realizations and a great influence left to the user, not balanced by any instrument in the hands of the author and with a relevant complexity issue to tackle (Nelson:2006). 
In general, character-based systems take an improvisational approach to drama, resembling the ``comedy of the art" tradition, first translated in a computational architecture by the work of Hayes-Roth (Hayes-Roth-etal:95). This approach - whose realization has been encouraged by the availability of conceptual and practical tools to model characters as autonomous agents - conflicts with the realization of a specific direction. More importantly, the notion of directionality itself is at risk, since the emergent plot is not even guaranteed to realize any direction at all. 
Together with direction, also conflicts are not explicitly and uniformly represented in most of the existing systems, and this causes a decrease of the dramatic impact on the audience. It is desirable that the future systems can develop a better connection between authorial control, through a clearly stated direction, and the actual performance control that the system operates through characters' actions.

Whatever the chosen approach - character-based or story-based - it is widely acknowledged that the control over the story is related with the issue of communicative effectiveness; at the same time, the author's control over the story must confront with the autonomy and the believability of the characters. For some specific forms of communication and entertainment, design strategies have emerged: for example, in video games, the quality of playability, anchored in a carefully shaped, strongly constrained story, is preferred over the definition of psychologically believable, full-fledged characters. 
AI systems envisage interactivity as a main objective, sustained by a rich literature on interactive storytelling  
and drama (Murray:98, Ryan:2006, Wardripfruin-harrigan:2004). These systems rely on agent theories to model characters, and adopt planning techniques to cope with non-determinism at the story level, often combined according to sophisticated architectural designs. However, a consolidated approach has not emerged yet that fully reconciles the two conflicting dimensions of story and characters. 

In AI research, the support to writing is mostly confined to the design of the plot, with a particular concern for branching plots, needed to realize interactive systems. 
The Zocalo framework by the Liquid Narrative Group at the NCSU is based on a technique, called narrative mediation (Saretto-etal 2003, Thomas-Young 2006), that allows the author to devise a branching plot by accounting for the traceability of the characters' intentions by the audience, in line with the requirements of expressivity posed by Senger (1999). Repositories of abstract plots, based on narratology and semiotics, have been proposed as a tool for helping both human authors and artificial systems  to create effective stories (Theune-etal 2004, Hartmann-etal 2005).
Concerning purely character-based approaches, the dominant paradigm delivered to authors is given by the BDI model of agency [***REF***], normally augmented with a model of emotions, such as the cognitive theory by Ortony, Clore and Collins [***REF***]. For example, the system described by Aylett (2007) incorporates an agent model, integrated with an affective component specifically aimed at modeling empathy. In the Virtual Storyteller system, the OCC model of emotion is integrated in the deliberative component of the agents, affecting their inclination to goals. A non BDI-based, yet action-based definition of the characters can be found in Façade (Mateas, Stern 2005), in which the authoring consists mainly in writing complex joint plans that encompass the roles of the characters and the user to reach one of a clearly stated set of outcomes; the generation of the plot is obtained through a hierarchical plan language (ABL), that encodes multi-agent plans including the user. Through this language, the system allows the author to define a set of beats or storytelling segments that represent an interpersonal conflict among the characters; in the presence of alternative options, the behaviour of the system is guided by a measure of the plot's emotional value (which follows a reverse U-shape dramatic arc). In Façade, the author can strictly control the system reaction to the user through the definition of the plans, while the control of direction is again left to a try-and-test iterative design, only applicable to the individual stories. 
In the system described by (Pizzi-etal:2007), based on Madame Bovary novel, the behaviour of each character is generated by a heuristic-search planner limited to one action; the planning operators represent `feelings' (from the novel informal ontology) that manipulate the mental state of the characters to change their beliefs. Like in the Erasmatron, the author defines the initial mental state of the characters, but the character behaviour respond to a more structured and high-level plan-based system rather than “reactive” inclination rules, without enforcing an explicit notion of direction and thus leading to a try-and-test methodology on characters' definition to tune the behaviour of the system. 
The SOAR cognitive architecture [***REF***]has also been exploited to build character-based interactive systems, requiring the author to describe the virtual character in terms of rules that encode the way it reasons and acts.
A general comment on these approaches concerns the general recognition of the key role played by emotions. Following the dominant paradigm of agents in AI, computational storytelling has implicitly equated characters to agents (Machado:04,Petta:05), thus establishing a perspective from which having a model of characters' emotions is necessary to improve the realism and the believability of the agents. So, emotions have been integrated in the characters' rational model, in line with a well-established trend in cognitive studies (Damasio:95). In (Theune-etal:03), emotions provide an instrument for increasing the individual variability of behaviour in the automatic generation of plot, or, at the expressive level, model editing and mise-en-scene (Zagalo:04) or define avatars and virtual actors (Pelachaud:05,Lisetti:06). 

Finally, in these approaches the author needs a competence in the logical and technical frameworks used for the encoding of characters behaviours and user interactions, thus diminishing the possibilities of these systems to be used by the mass of authors. We believe that it is possible to devise a supporting tool for authors, that features the descriptive sophistication and simulative environment of these approaches while offering an interface that is closer to the way authors conceive stories, starting from characters. However, we also believe that an encompassing approach that can reconcile plot and characters within a single framework is far from reachable given the current state-of-the-art. So, the ADRIAN project will limit the approach to the encoding of character traits (in a multiple character environment) in a descriptive language, which will be amenable to authors, and to perform an ontology-based reasoning to support the search of solutions for story advancements (in both the linear anfd the interactive contexts) within a single scene (and not an entire plot). 

Conclusions on the project context

The idea is that in the digital media context it is hard to manage storytelling through a strong authorial control of the plot, as in the case of traditional storytelling. The models that have been proposed either provide plot architectures that refer to computer science practice and are not suitable for the working methods that are typical of authors. Authors look for situations or characters that can emotionally engage the audience, rather than abstract plot structures that provide a neat and comprehensive organization of the story material. Also, the control of the plot seems too a hard problem to solve for the generic interactive context of new media: the reason seems to lie in the limited models of the users’ cognitive capabilities that we own at the current stage of development. The result is that we cannot profitably take into account the interactive aspects of a story and develop plot structures that can effectively incorporate the interactive component under a strict authorial control of the story development. 

So, the major idea behind the ADRIAN project is to go back to the principal components of the story that authors have in mind when they conceive a story and try to model those components to provide automatic support to authors. Characters represent a suitable departure point from plot-based approaches in this perspective. Characters are entities that authors deal with and at the same time have received a formal treatment through the AI-based approaches to emergent narrative. Characters, with their decisions and actions, which must be believable with respect to what we know from the story up to some point, make the story advances. The specific problem addressed by ADRIAN is the effective support to the author’s task of devising a credible behaviour for a character in a story fragment. 
Traditionally authors split the plot of the story into units at different levels of abstraction (in film and theatre they are usually called acts, sequences and scenes, in decreasing abstraction order). The ADRIAN project focuses on the scene level, i.e. the minimal units that realize a story advancement. For each scene, in fact, the author wants to achieve some dramatic goal, and the characters who take part in the scene must behave in a credible way so that the goal is achieved. Let us consider, e.g., two characters. Dusk is the determinate chief of a partisan commando and has the goal of accomplishing a mission at any cost; Echo is his noble assistant and lets his humanity prevails over mission accomplishment. We can depict two scenarios.
1.	The author states the initial conditions of a scene. Then the system elaborates one step of reasoning starting from the values at stake defined for the characters and proposes to the author some character behaviour. The author selects one of the possible behaviours or gets inspiration from the proposals to yield the actual behaviour for some character. For example, in the case above, the system can propose an event that challenge the mission accomplishment for Dusk and Dusk shows a resolute attitude towards the accomplishment of the mission; Echo must look for some action that lets him prove his generosity towards the human kind that will lead him to abandon (at least temporarily) the mission.
2.	The author states the goal of the scene. Then the system elaborates proper characters’ behaviours that lead to the accomplishment of the goal. For example, in the story above, the author wants the commando to split and leave the assistant Echo apart. The system simulates possible characters behaviours that lead to the split of the commando; the development of the characters behaviours is now constrained by the final result of the scene. The system proposes an event that is compatible for Echo to show his generosity and Dusk to resist in his determination to accomplish the mission. For example, the two discover that in a farm house one civilian is held and tortured by the soldiers; Echo decides to stop over to free the civilian, while Dusk is resolute to accomplish the mission; this leads to the splitting of the commando. So, the author selects one solution among the solutions that are consistent with the definition of characters and the situation at hand in order to make the story advance convincingly toward the dramatic goal he has devised for the scene. 
In the first scenario, we have a look-ahead strategy over possible actions that characters can undertake in some contextual conditions set by the author. This situation is typical of the first act in the Hollywood film industry when the author usually presents the characters and sets the stage for the audience to understand the incidents and the climax of the second act. Here we are exploiting the knowledge over the basic traits of the characters (a sort of meta-model). In the second scenario, we have a double constraint on the initial and the final conditions of a scene; so, the actions deliberated by the characters must be compliant with the frame conditions. 
These proposals over characters behaviours can be addressed via a few methods devised in the AI tradition above, which have already been employed to some extent in the interactive storytelling research. The specific concern is for the deliberative components having reference to planning and execution of actions driven by their motivations and goals (Beliefs, Desires and Intentions in the BDI paradigm [Bratman-etal 1987, Rao and Georgeff 1991], logic representations of norms and social rules [Sguros], and personal goals and relations [Gratch 200?], behavioural strategies connected to characters’ emotional response [REF Cavazza]. Usually, such approaches have been geared to the control of characters in the implementation of a “weak” emergent narrative, i.e. a narrative not strictly controlled by an author, but that relies on the characters’ autonomous behaviour for a number of decisions (Mateas and Stern 2003; Cavazza et al. 2007; Aylett et al. 2007). 
The working hypothesis of the ADRIAN project is that it is possible to fill a gap between the author’s work on characters and the automatic control of characters’ behaviours by realizing a tool that supports the author in finding solutions to the story advancement. Characters are pervasive to the authoring practice, which usually posits the creation of characters at an earlier stage with respect to the plot. Centring the project on the character perspective allows to bridging traditional and interactive storytelling forms, and regaining most of the insights provided by traditional scriptwriting and authorial practices (encoded in the paradigms outlined above). The character perspective is exportable across genres and media, while plot/structure, as revealed by the mentioned projects, is very dependent on specific stories or media products. Characters are the engines that make the story advance through their actions; such actions must be compliant with credible decisions with respect to the character personality and constrained to the plot lines defined by the author; finally, the combination of several characters’ actions have to be coordinated in an individual story.
There are a number of possible scenarios concerning the authors’ work.
•	Abstracting from the example above, the system can provide automatic generation of characters’ behaviours for the author to evaluate the compliance of such behaviours with the goals of the scene or to find inspiration for the story advancement. The system can investigate a limited look ahead over the possibilities offered by a certain state of affairs (otherwise the generation process becomes intractable) and the author can choose, possibly modifying, some solution (system propose mode) or validate authorial solutions with respect to a limited number of characters traits (system dispose mode). 
•	The author can investigate the consequences of adopting a certain cast in a scene: in this case, the author may realize that the way characters are defined is not compatible with certain advancements of the story; for example, this could be the case if the description of the characters is not likely to generate a conflict among them.
The system can establish relationships of characters’ decisions onto a high-level description of the plot: in this case the author may specify situation constraints at both a scene, i.e. local, level and a story, i.e. global, level and the system may avoid solutions that prevent some further development; for example, the system may discover that, given a solution, the consequence is that the character comes to possess some information at a very early time, then preventing other developments later.

[Describe in detail the S&T objectives.]
[They should be stated in a measurable and verifiable form, including through the milestones that will be indicated under section 1.3 below.]

ADRIAN goals and method
The goal of the ADRIAN project is to support authors in the creation and deployment of characters in the storytelling process: the project will implement a tool that supports the author in the definition of characters according to a number of basic traits, is able to automate reasoning about character traits and simulating character behaviour, and suggests possible solutions to story advancement, with an empirical validation through pilot productions.

Character traits to be modelled will be devised through a thorough analysis of a corpus of pre-production materials from the audiovisual and gaming industries and by extensively studying the literature sketched above and the systems that have been implemented in the commercial and research environments. As revealed by the story paradigms derived from the linear storytelling tradition, we expect different types of descriptive traits: 
•	change or stability, 
•	role type, ranging from Main Character (Field), Protagonist (McKee) and Hero (Vogler) - which always play the principal part - to Impact Character (Dramatica) - that drives the audience’s alternative reception of the story –, Antagonist (McKee) - that engages in a conflict with the Protagonist -, …,
•	values at stake, for creating unbalanced situations that need to be solved, 
•	intentionality, for moving the course of events through the connections between characters’ motivations and actions,
•	“transformation” (Seger) in characters’ attitudes and emotions, 
•	…
So, a first milestone of the project will be a survey of the character traits as revealed by this extensive study and test of systems. Traits will be arranged according to a meta-level knowledge over characters through stories and approaches as well as according to knowledge-level grouped according to foundational upper-level ontologies. A contribution from the production partners will be draft stories as well as stories from their previous experience to describe according to the traits. This will serve as a tester for the trait survey. 
The deliverable of this phase will be a report of the findings, which will be publicly available. 

Then we will devise a descriptive language based on an appropriate ontological framework in order to support interoperability though stories and automated reasoning through planning systems. One of the partners involved in ADRIAN (Teesside) has operated with both HSP and Re-planning approaches. Also, in devising the descriptive language we will be compatible with media annotation languages, in order to improve interoperability between pure authoring and media production based on the authored product. An example of media annotation language of this type is COMM, based on DOLCE foundational ontology and MPEG-7 standard, involving one the partners of this project (CWI) and supported by two projects of the 6th framework (K-Space and X-Media). 
[More on modeling character traits and supporting reasoning ???]
semantic annotation and its use missing ... tags are tested in rules and are of primary importance as inputs and as constraints in the process of story creation; moreover, tagged scenes and characters can be re-used in different stories ... still missing in the WP descriptions!!
The language will be used to encode the traits devised in the previous phase. So, a second milestone is a repository of traits encoded in the descriptive language. The repository will also include basic sample plans and constraints rules required to encode the draft stories provided by the production partners. 
The deliverable of this phase will be both the repository, accessible through a suitable interface, and a report describing the repository. 

The software outcome of the ADRIAN project will be an authoring tool targeted to authors of linear and interactive stories. The authoring tool architecture will clearly separate the computational engine, at the core of the project, from its graphical interface. The system will allow the author to describe and store a set of characters and scenes. The author, through an appropriate interface, can build a character from a set of basic traits and test the trait values in a plan-based system that governs the character behaviour. S/he can also define constraints at the scene level. At run-time the author assigns the characters an initial state in a scene with some constraints; then the author can build the scene step-by-step; each step consists of a change in the state of a character, of characters – possibly in conflict -; at each step, the system checks whether the state changes approved by the author do not collide with the constraints. Constraints rules can range from the basic needs of coherency in storytelling, such as avoiding repetitions (e.g., an argument cannot be used twice, or some object cannot be grasped if not visible in the scene), through more specific rules belonging to particular genres, to custom rules appropriately defined for a specific production. An example of a logic suitable or constraints is in (Sgouros 1999). So, as claimed above, the system won’t be intended to help inventing the story, but to help verifying the compatibility, coherence and credibility of an action sequence performed by the participants to the story.
Since it is predictable that the definition of constraints rules could not be an easy task for authors, the ADRIAN system will be equipped with a basic set of constraint rules, emerged during the early stages of requirements definition, tested during development, and refined during the pilot production phases, respectively. Also, the system will be equipped with a graphical interface, developed by a skilled content creator and after an analysis of the user requirements carried out by the research partner in collaboration with the production partners. A first, basic, version of the interface will be mostly based on the widely diffused WIMP paradigm (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer). The author will interact through the use of widgets and most of the information (e.g., when the story is violating a rule) will be issued as text descriptions; a different interface paradigm will be developed in the pilot production phase. 
The milestone of this phase is a prototype of the ADRIAN system and the engine, with a report on the test over the draft stories. 
The deliverable is the prototype, released within the open-source paradigm and a manual of use for the system and the graphical interface.

In the final phase, the ADRIAN system will be tested in use in three real productions. The production partners have experience in linear and interactive stories, and will involve authors and producers in testing the system, with consequences on refinements and debugging, on a real production that will be currently available at the time. Submarine will deal with interactive stories connected to game development and involving well defined characters; the pilot production will test whether the system can improve the game designers to define characters (usually not well traced in the game industry) through the system support. BBC will establish a liaison with the production pipeline of interactive TV programmes; TV programmes can use a limited version of the interactivity (because of the technical limitations); we see whether the support to character behaviour generation can improve the immersion of viewers. VRMMP will test the system on the Machinima approach, by integrating the core ADRIAN into a 3D real-time authoring environment; we believe that Machinima authoring systems would greatly benefit from the character-centred approach in developing the linear stories built upon the game engine and 3D content capabilities. The authoring system will be based on one of the many 3D engines freely available in the OpenSource movement, on which VRMMP is actively contributing to the development (www.ogre3D.org).
The milestones of this phase will be three pilot productions. 
The deliverables will be both the productions and a report of the production activity with the evidence for the ADRIAN results. 

[Show how they relate to the topics addressed by the call, which you should explicitly identify.]
Topic advanced by the call: (a) Advanced Authoring
explore new forms of content, provide enhanced experience
support creative process & experimentation
more interactive, expressive & perceptual content borrowing from:
game technology, virtual environments
computer animation, visualisation, simulation
non-linear narratives, interactive storytelling …
generate metadata as new content is created/captured; 
find reference & inspirational material, remix, share ...
… for professional or personal use

Matching with the topics of the Third Call

This proposal addresses the following objective of the 2007-2008 Work Programme (Intelligent Content and Semantics); it falls into the category of “ICT for Content Creativity and Personal Development”:
“Advanced authoring environments for the creation of novel forms of interactive and expressive content enabling multimodal experimentation and non-linear story-telling. These environments will ease content sharing and remixing, also by non-expert users, by automatically tagging content with semantic metadata and by using open standards to store it in networked repositories supporting symbolic and similarity-based indexing and search capabilities, for all content types.”

Interactive Storytelling epitomises the notion of “digital resources that embody creativity and semantics”, which would enable creators to “Design more communicative and participative forms of content”. 

The development of Interactive Storytelling technologies is primarily of interest to creative industries. The content sector in Europe accounts for 5% of the GDP and the creative sector employs approximately 3.5% of the EU workforce. 

Milestones for verifying the advancement of the project

Month 6: Survey of the operative techniques existing in the traditional approach to storytelling in digital media for representing characters and simulating their behaviour … A public deliverable with tests over a sample case … 

Month 15: Character's model
…
Month 24: Engine prototype
…
Month 30: Pilot productions
…
Month 36: Final report
…

1.2	Progress beyond the state-of-the-art [4/5 pages, now 1]
Describe the state-of-the-art in the area concerned, and the advance that the proposed project would bring about. If applicable, refer to the results of any patent search you might have carried out.

Storytelling authoring has a long-standing literature and a business status in linear narrative and a challenging debate with respect to new media developments. There have been several advancements in the recent years in the areas related to the project. In the following paragraphs we address each area by describing the state of the art as well as the advancements brought about by this project. 
[For each section, say how the project will progress with respect to current state of the art]

Plot-driven approaches in Interactive storytelling
Results of previous European projects [NM2 and InScape, others?] 
Interactive storytelling ERASMATRON (Crawford) 

Story paradigms and tools for linear screenplay writing
There exist a number of story paradigms [REFs] that feature differences with respect to character description. 

The linear screenplay writing phase is supported by commercial tools, such as Final Draft (http://www.finaldraft.com/), which helps organizing the material according to audiovisual industry requirements, or Dramatica Pro (http://www.dramatica.com/), which assists the author in creating characters and story plots. Dramatica Pro is also a theory, not only a software tool. 

----- da rossana ----

In the last decade, a number of AI systems for entertainment and communication have appeared that -notwithstanding different design goals and conceptions - share a set of common features, including the use of artificial characters in storytelling and drama. Such systems have been built for different applications, ranging from entertainment (Mateas-Stern:05, Pizzi-etal:2007) to education (Si-etal:2005, Aylett-etal:2007) and information presentation (Kopp-etal:05, Damiano-etal:06), rely on various modalities for the communication with the user, including natural language and graphics, and support different styles of interaction with the user, like dialogue, direct manipulation or even embodiment. Concerning the architectural aspects, various AI techniques have been employed to realize these systems, like planning techniques and agent technologies; centralized or distributed frameworks have been employed for system control.
Given this heterogeneity of goals and instruments, a first, broad distinction has been established in the literature between character-based and story-based systems. Story-based systems are characterized by centralized architectures, in which the behaviour displayed by the system, possibly through the medium of characters, is driven by the unifying principle of a story. The story to be conveyed is usually underspecified in some way, so as to provide some (limited) support to non-determinism and interactivity. Conversely, character-based systems rely on characters as a way to create interactions, which are then interpreted in terms of emergent narrative structures. The story to be conveyed, in this case, is normally specified only in terms of the roles played by the characters, accompanied by an initial configuration in which the different characters' beliefs and goals conflict. In both cases, gaining the engagement of the user is postulated as a consequence of the system's ability to constrain the characters' behaviour in terms of drama, a feature that is normally put in relation with an emotional dimension.
In the perspective of authorial control, specifying the direction of drama - whatever the language employed for this purpose - equates to identifying a set of plots that realize that direction. The direction can be specified as to identify a well circumscribed subset of plots; clearly, this approach limits the intervention of the user, but simplifies the authorial issues, enhancing the control on the development of drama.
Or, the direction can be left underdetermined, so as to identify a larger set of different realizations in terms of plots. In this case, the system is likely to be more deeply influenced by the behaviour of the user, but this feature is not balanced by the appearance of equally strong instruments in the hands of the author. Moreover, this approach requires the use of techniques that limit the complexity of the search problem (Nelson:2006). 
In general, character-based systems take an improvisational approach to drama, resembling the ``comedy of the art" tradition, first translated in a computational architecture by the work of Hayes-Roth (Hayes-Roth-etal:95). This approach - whose realization has been encouraged by the availability of conceptual and practical tools to model characters as autonomous agents - conflicts with the realization of a specific direction. More importantly, the notion of directionality itself is at risk, since the emergent plot is not even guaranteed to realize any direction at all. 
Together with direction, also conflicts are not explicitly and uniformly represented in most of the existing systems, and this causes a decrease of the dramatic impact on the audience. It is desirable that the future systems can develop a better connection between authorial control, through a clearly stated direction, and the actual performance control that the system operates through characters' actions.

Whatever the chosen approach - character-based or story-based - it is widely acknowledged that the control over the story is related with the issue of communicative effectiveness; at the same time, the author's control over the story must confront with the autonomy and the believability of the characters. For some specific forms of communication and entertainment, design strategies have emerged: for example, in video games, the quality of playability, anchored in a carefully shaped, strongly constrained story, is preferred over the definition of psychologically believable, full-fledged characters.
AI systems envisage interactivity as a main objective, sustained by a rich literature on interactive storytelling  
and drama (Murray:98, Ryan:2006, Wardripfruin-harrigan:2004). These systems rely on agent theories to model characters, and adopt planning techniques to cope with non-determinism at the story level, often combined according to sophisticated architectural designs. However, a consolidated approach has not emerged yet that fully reconciles the two conflicting dimensions of story and characters. 

State of the art in support of storytelling authoring [TBD]
Storytelling authoring has a long-standing literature in linear narrative and a challenging debate . 

[Plot-driven approaches in Interactive storytelling]
Interactive storytelling ERASMATRON (Crawford) [TBD]

There exist a number of story paradigms [REFs] that feature differences with respect to character description. 

The linear screenplay writing phase is supported by commercial tools, such as Final Draft (http://www.finaldraft.com/), which helps organizing the material according to audiovisual industry requirements, or Dramatica Pro (http://www.dramatica.com/), which assists the author in creating characters and story plots. 

[AI research in support writing]
In AI research, the support to writing is mostly confined to the design of the plot, with a particular concern for branching plots, needed to realize interactive systems. The Zocalo framework by the Liquid Narrative Group at the NCSU is based on a technique, called narrative mediation (Saretto-etal 2003), that allows the author to devise a branching plot by accounting for the traceability of the characters' intentions by the audience, in line with the requirements of expressivity posed by Senger (1999). Repositories of abstract plots, based on narratology and semiotics, have been proposed as a tool for helping both human authors and artificial systems  to create effective stories (Theune-etal 2004, Hartmann-etal 2005).
Concerning purely character-based approaches, the dominant paradigm delivered to authors is given by the BDI model of agency, normally augmented with a model of emotions, such as the cognitive theory by Ortony, Clore and Collins. For example, the system described by Aylett (2007) incorporates an agent model, integrated with an affective component specifically aimed at modeling empathy. In the Virtual Storyteller system, the OCC model of emotion is integrated in the deliberative component of the agents, affecting their inclination to goals.
A non BDI-based, yet action-based definition of the characters can be found in Façade, in which the authoring consists mainly in writing complex joint plan that encompass the role of the characters and the user.  The SOAR cognitive architecture has also been exploited to build character-based interactive systems, requiring the author to describe the virtual character in terms of rules that encode the way it reasons and acts.

In the system described by (Pizzi-etal:2007), the behaviour of each character is generated by a heuristic-search planner, and planning is limited to the selection of the next action, to cope with asynchronous user intervention without resorting to re-planning. The planning operators represent `feelings' that manipulate the mental state of the characters. An informal ontology, extracted from the novel by which the story is inspired, Madame Bovary, defines how characters' feelings vary and evolve as a consequence of the changes in their beliefs, and how they affect the characters' behaviour.
In this system, the author defines the initial mental state of the characters and a set of planning operators for each character. The resulting initial situation is open to opposite endings, depending on the user's input, and the moment this input is provided. The notion of conflict is mostly internal to the characters' mental states, which can evolve towards different final outcomes as a consequence of feelings. This system does not enforce an explicit notion of direction to provide a stronger control on the story development; characters, in order to appear responsive and thus gain the user engagement, lack explicitly coded intentions in favour of an emotionally-based behaviour. From the author's point of view, the possibility for the user to affect the beliefs and feelings of the characters at any time, and the use of HSP planning, are likely to determine a large plan space: so, deriving the possible plots in advance is an infeasible strategy for the author, leading to hypothesize a methodology consisting of iterative testing and modifications of the characters' definition to tune the behaviour of the system to the (non stated) author's direction.

Previous work by the same group experimented the same character-based paradigm with the hierarchical planning paradigm, which led to a different architectural design. In the system described in (Cavazza-etal:02), characters are committed to specific goals (like seducing another character), and reactively form intentions (i.e., partially instantiated plans) to achieve them. The user interacts with them by cooperating (for example, giving suggestions) or conflicting (for example, impeding actions); the actions of the user affect the behaviour of the characters, either influencing their future deliberation (characters' high level plans are detailed out only when execution approximates, leaving room for the user's advice) or forcing them to replan. The characters are executed concurrently, so that further conflicts may emerge from their interaction.
From the author's point of view, the use of the HTN planning paradigm allows a more direct control of the development of the plot, since it directly connects the characters' behaviour with the specification of their goal; as a drawback, it reduces the responsiveness of the system, that must recur to replanning techniques to display a flexible behaviour. 

The Façade system (Mateas-Stern:05) is designed to conduct the interactive drama to clearly stated set of outcomes, in which the protagonist couple either splits or remains together, with the user being neutral or sympathizing for one of the two sides. In Façade, the richness of the user experience resides in the user becoming a protagonist of the story, triggering (but not entirely controlling) the evolution of the plot towards one of the available directions. The generation of the plot is obtained through a hierarchical plan language (ABL), that encodes multi-agent plans; the plan language also accounts for the role of the user in the joint action. Through this language, the system allows the author to define a set of beats, which represent an interpersonal conflict among the characters (as reported in the formal framework). The inclusion of the joint plans in the interactive story is affected by the interaction with the user. In the presence of alternative options, the behaviour of the system is guided by a measure of the plot's emotional value (which is constrained to follow a particular reverse U shape), modelled by a function with accounts for several various heterogeneous aspects (story completion, intrinsic emotional value of actions, etc.). While the role of the user in the interaction with the characters can be clearly stated by the author through the definition of the plans, the way the system behaviour is affected by the story value is more difficultly controlled, opening again a perspective of iterative design of the individual application. In general, the system lends itself to represent stereotypical situations of one-act plays, in which the perspective on characters is somewhat reversed with respect to a rational and emotional approach to agency: here, the characters tend to be shaped by the actions they perform and the things they say in the space of the interpersonal relations, instead of being clearly stated by an a priori definition from which intentions can subsequently be derived.

The Mimesis (Riedl-Young:06) storytelling system, currently evolving into the Zocalo service-oriented architecture (Thomas-young:2006), is based on a different design philosophy, which explicitly aims at constraining the interaction with the user to the realization of a specific direction, instead of relying on an emergent story. The story is generated offline by a partial order planner; the planner assembles actions executed by all the characters in order to construct a plan that fulfils the goal stated by the author. While doing so, it sees to it that the intentions of the characters remain clearly recognizable to the user along the plan, and that no actions are inserted in the plan only to meet the needs of drama, without being part of the motivational structure of the characters. The core of this system operates at the directional level, trying to substantiate the given direction in a multi-agent plan; the direction is stated as a goal for the planner (for example “the vilain bribes the president”). The representation of the characters' intentions is reduced to the form of “intention frames”, a motivational account of the actions with which the plot is annotated.
The plan is then analyzed to detect the potential impact of users' input, and converted in a conditional plan in which user input is accounted for in advance. This powerful technique, called `narrative mediation', allows the author to know in advance, in full detail, the possible forms of the plot, encoded in a plot tree. As a result, the mental state of the characters is accounted for only indirectly, collapsing the conceptual distinction between the direction and the characters' goals to a hybrid intermediate representation

Notwithstanding the differences displayed by the various approaches to drama for what
concerns the theoretical stance and aims of their investigation, the key role played by emotions
seems to be a common aspect to most drama definitions.
Research in computational drama has inherited from drama criticism the centrality of emotions
Following the dominant paradigm of agents in AI, computational drama has implicitly equated
characters to agents (Machado:04,Petta:05), thus establishing a perspective from which having
a model of characters' emotions is necessary to improve the realism and the believability of the
characters. In this approach (``character as agent"), emotions have been integrated in the
characters' rational model, in line with a well-established trend in cognitive studies
(Damasio:95). For example, in (Theune-etal:03) emotions provide an instrument for
increasing the individual variability of behaviour in the automatic generation of plot.
More recently, computational drama has tackled the issue of emotions at the expressive level. Here, works range from the emotional properties of editing and mise-en-scene in interactive drama (Zagalo:04), to the expression of emotions in avatars and virtual actors (Pelachaud:05,Lisetti:06). 

Elements for narrative forms
A media production can be structured according to various narrative forms. Narrative can be used to shape the high-level structure of a generated media product. We look at existing systems where narrative has been used to shape the presentation of material. We investigate more complex forms, by examining three types of narrative, in order of complexity: associative narrative, template-based narrative and story-based narrative. Each step is potentially able to provide a better narrative, at the cost of more knowledge required.

Associative narrative
In using associative narrative, a system assembles sequences of media items or clips which are associated (in some form) to each other and/or to the viewer’s interests. The specific nature of the association is transparent to the system, which only measures how much two items or clips are associated with each other and edit the sequence accordingly. Very often this form of narrative is used by K-annotation systems, and the degree to which two items or clips are associated is calculated using the number of overlapping keywords. Two examples of this are ConTour [Murtaugh96] and the KORSAKOW SYSTEM a nonlinear and interactive documentary generation system. The system arranges the screen so that it shows one main film part and up to three follow-up clips in a preview window. The user can decide which one to follow. As in ConTour, follow-up clips are chosen by the system looking at the keywords with which the clips have been annotated, where the greater the number of overlapping keywords the stronger the relation between clips is. An associative narrative can also be generated using P-annotation systems, which use more complex rules to determine the degree of association, as in Lev Manovich’s SOFT CINEMA, a system that edits movies in real time by selecting media items from a database. Analogously to the Korsakow System, Soft Cinema presents the screen divided into several regions where different media are played. During playback, individual media items are assigned to the regions according to rules. These editing rules are written by an author and select and sequence clips according to the clip content and shot properties. A rule can sequence clips based on whether their content annotations are analogous or different (e.g. select clips that are annotated with location: interior of a pub) and/or on whether their shot properties are analogous or different
(e.g. select clips that are annotated with camera movement: pan left). Soft Cinema and the Korsakow System both show media in a way that stimulates the viewer to make sense of what she is seeing. In this scenario the viewer’s role is a very active one, continuously trying to construct meaning out of what she sees, which allows both systems to implement only simple editing rules and leave the viewer free in her meaning-making endeavor. An associative narrative does not require the definition and the exploitation of complex relations between media items and could be implemented using the properties of the annotated material. On the other hand, associative narrative is best suited for artistic purposes, and Bordwell (Bordwell03, p. 154) describes how this type of narrative (called associational form) is used in experimental films. These films draw on a poetic series of transitions between groups of images that may not have immediate logical connections, but, because of the juxtaposition, invite the viewer to find some.

Template-based narrative
As early approaches to video generation showed (see for example the first experiments in Train of Thought [Halliday93]), sequencing video clips according to associative narrative did not produce engaging stories. Since there is no model of what a coherent and engaging story is, one can only hope that the story is coherent and engaging. To overcome this limitation, video generation systems looked at narrative studies with the goal of building a story model. Such models can be roughly divided into two main approaches:
•	trying to capture the structure of stories and 
•	trying to capture the logic of stories. 

Modeling the structure of stories is based on the assumption that stories are composed of an ordered list of different phases. For example, AGENT STORIES [Brooks99] is an authoring environment for metalinear narratives, i.e. narratives composed of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in different ways, to tell different stories from different points of view. Agent Stories uses a story structure based on Branigan’s work [Branigan92], composed of introduction, character introduction, conflict, negotiation, resolution, diversion and ending. Each phase has particular properties, for example the introduction presents the subject of the story and its environment. An interesting feature of Agent Stories is that the system provides feedback functionality to support the author. This consists of an environment where the writer can apply different story styles to see which stories are generated. An automatic generation approach should provide some feedback to the author (the documentarist in our case) about how the final sequences look, so that the author can revise the process in case the quality of the generation is unsatisfactory. Two main techniques are used to place items in a story structure: the first is to annotate each item with the particular story phase for which it is suited, while the second is to establish rules that determine in which story phase an item should be placed. The first approach is used by, for example, Agent Stories and TRAIN OF THOUGHT [Halliday93], a story engine for multi-threaded video stories. Train of Thought presents the user with multiple versions of the same love story, selecting and sequencing video clips contained in an annotated database. Assigning a narrative role to media items has two drawbacks: the first is that it can be difficult to asses the role a media item should play, since it might depend on the story. The second is that the use of the clip can potentially be limited to play only the role the author determined at authoring time. Disc [Geurts03] uses rules to determine in which story phase an item should be placed. Rules in Disc are based on the concept of actants from Greimas [Greimas83]. Actants are stereotypical characters or roles that recur in each narrative of a particular genre; Greimas analyzed fairy tales where the recurrent characters are, for example, the subject (the hero of the story) or the opponent (an obstacle to the hero’s mission). Based on this idea, Disc allows the author of a presentation to specify the possible characters for each genre, such as biography. Using rules allows more flexibility in the generation of narratives, since the role an item plays need not be determined beforehand at authoring time. The system can determine at run-time which items fulfill which role in the presentation. On the other hand, rules in Disc use domain concepts and characters specific to a genre (biography in Disc’s case). In general, (non-trivial) rules need to be based on a domain model and a story model. The applicability of this approach to our case is therefore analogous to the applicability of a story-based narrative.

Story-based narrative
Story-based approaches try to capture the logic of stories. This logic is encoded in a story plan, executed by some planner. One of the components of a story plan is a story structure such as the ones used in template-based narratives. The difference is that the story planner composes this structure so that the resulting story is coherent, i.e. every clip is chosen according to an intent. Therefore, at each moment in the story the choice of which clip to insert depends on the previous clips. Characters’ actions should be in line with their own previous actions [Theune03]. Related work in the previous section practically ignored this direct dependency. Terminal Time [Mateas00] is an example of a story-based video generation system. Terminal Time uses a rhetorical plan as the story plan. Another example is Nack’s Auteur [Nack96]. Auteur uses a model of its domain, i.e. humor. This model provides the strategies to achieve humor in a story, by encoding concepts such as inappropriateness, paradox, dissimilarity or unexpected outcome of actions. Finally, IDIC [Sack94] generates video sequences according to a story plan by selecting appropriate segments from an archive of annotated clips from trailers of “Start Trek: The Next Generation”, a space adventure story. According to the authors, the montage of video sequences could be done using inferencing rules based on common-sense knowledge. This would require sufficient common-sense knowledge to be encoded to cover all possible montage sequences. 

Story-based narrative approaches need a model of the domain (e.g. Rhetorical goals in Terminal Time, humor in Auteur and space adventure stories in IDIC), and a knowledge-base representing common-sense knowledge (in Auteur and IDIC), or more specific knowledge (rhetoric in Terminal Time). Since in our case the repository can grow with new items, we cannot foresee what knowledge will be required to reason on items which have not yet been added. Building a knowledge-base is not feasible in our approach, which is required to be media-driven.

References:
•	D. Bordwell and K. Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction . McGraw-Hill, 7 edition, 2003.
•	E. Branigan. Narrative Comprehension and Film . Routledge, New York, 1992.
•	K. Brooks. Metalinear Cinematic Narrative: Theory, Process, and Tool . PhD thesis, MIT, 1999.
•	J. Geurts, S. Bocconi, J. van Ossenbruggen, and L. Hardman. Towards Ontologydriven Discourse: From Semantic Graphs to Multimedia Presentations. In D. Fensel, K. Sycara, and J. Mylopoulos, editors, Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003) , pages 597–612, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, October 20-23, 2003. Springer-Verlag.
•	J. Greimas. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
•	M. Halliday. Digital Cinema: An Environment for Multi-Threaded Stories. Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993.
•	 M. Mateas. Generation of Ideologically-Biased Historical Documentaries. In Proceedings of AAAI 2000 , pages 36–42, July 2000.
•	M. Murtaugh. The Automatist Storytelling System . PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996.
•	F. Nack. AUTEUR: The Application of Video Semantics and Theme Representation in Automated Video Editing . PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 1996.
•	W. Sack and M. Davis. IDIC: Assembling Video Sequences from Story Plans and Content Annotations. In IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS) , Boston, Massachusetts, May 14-19, 1994.
•	M. Theune, S. Faas, D. Heylen, and A. Nijholt. The virtual storyteller: Story creation by intelligent agents. In S. G¨obel, N. Braun, U. Spierling, J. Dechau, and H. Diener, editors, E 03: Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment . Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, 2003.

References
Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature, Baltimore, Md. London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Campbell, Joseph (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
Crawford, Chris, Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling, Berkeley, Calif., New Riders Games, 2005. 
Crawford, Chris (2002). Artists and engineers as cats and dogs: implications for interactive storytelling, Computer & Graphics 26, 13-20. 
Damiano et al. 2005 – Virtual Storytelling 
Dramatica: www.dramatica.com. © 1994-2006 Write Brothers, Inc. Based on theories and materials developed by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley. Dramatica is a registered trademark of Screenplay Systems Incorporated. Patent #5,734,916; #6,105,046
Egri, Lajos (1946), The art of dramatic writing, Simon&Schuster, New York. 
ESSLYN 1987 ???
Field, Syd, The definitive guide to screen writing, London, Ebury Press, 2003.
Glassner, Andrew S.. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction, AK Peters, 2004.
Hauge, M., & Vogler, C. (Writers), & Mefford, J. (Director). (2003). The Hero's 2 Journeys: Insider Secrets for Uniting the Outer Journey of Plot Structure with the Inner Journey of Character Arc [DVD]. New York: ScreenStyle.com. http://www.screenplaymastery.com. 
Huntley, C. N., & Phillips, M. A. (2004). Dramatica: A New Theory Of Story, Special 10th Anniversary Edition. Glendale, CA: Write Brothers, Inc.
Huntley, C. N. (2007). A Comparison of Seven Story Paradigms, Write Brothers, Inc http://www.dramatica.com/downloads/Dramatica%20paradigms-0707.pdf. 
Keir Elam, The Semiotic of Theatre and Drama, London and New York, Methuen, 1980
Laurel, Brenda, Computer as Theatre, Reading MA, Addison Wesley Longman, 1993.
Lavandier, Yves,  La dramaturgie, Cergy: Le clown et l'enfant, 1994.
McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting. New York: HarperCollins.
Miller, Carolyn Handler, Digital storytelling: a creator's guide to interactive entertainment, (Amsterdam, London, Focal Press, 2004. 
Mixon, Laura J. (1996), An ePilgrim's Progress: My Experiences with the Erasmatron, A New Tool for Creating Electronic Fiction. http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/PILGRIM2.html. 
Murray, Janet, Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1997.
Polti, Georges, The thirty-six dramatic situations, Boston, The Writer Inc., 1954.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, (edited), Narrative across media: the languages of storytelling, Lincoln, Neb.; London, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Avatars of story, Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press, Bristol, University Presses Marketing , 2006.
Seger. L. (1984). Making a Good Script Great. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.
Seger, L. (1990). Creating Unforgettable Characters. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Seger, L. (2003). Advanced Screenwriting: Raising your Script to the Academy Award Level.  Beverly Hills: Silman-James Press
Sgouros N. (1999). Dynamic generation, management and resolution of interactive plots, Artificial Intelligence 107, pp. 29-62. 
Tierno, Michael, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters, New York, Hyperion, 2002.
Truby, J.. (2007). The anatomy of story. Faber & Faber.
Vogler, C. (1998). The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, 2nd Edition. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Wardrip Fruin N., Harrigan P., editors,  Second person: role-playing and story in games and playable media, Cambridge, Mass., London, MIT, 2007.

[Crawford02]  Chris Crawford. Artists and engineers as cats and dogs: Implications for interactive storytelling. COMPUT GRAPHICS (PERGAMON). Vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 13-20. Feb. 2002. Elsevier.
[Storytron] http://www.storytron.com/
[Kafno07] Kafno P., Authoring for the Interactive Content Generation. First published in IBC2007 Conference Publication ISBN0-9533673-8-X ISBN 978-0-9533673-8-2. Supporting paper delivered at IBC07 in the IPTV Papers Session, Amsterdam, Sept. 2007.
[Balet07] Balet O., INSCAPE: An authoring platform for interactive stories. In Virtual Storytelling. Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling (Marc Cavazza, Stéphane Donikian Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4871, Springer 2007.

1.3	S/T methodology and associated work plan [5/7 pages, now 1]
A detailed work plan should be presented, broken down into work packages (WPs) which should follow the logical phases of the implementation of the project, and include consortium management and assessment of progress and results. (Please note that your overall approach to management will be described later, in section 2).

Please present your plans as follows:
i)	Describe the overall strategy of the work plan (Maximum length – one page)
ii)	Show the timing of the different WPs and their components (Gantt chart or similar). 
iii)	Provide a detailed work description broken down into work packages:
•	Work package list (please use table 1.3a);
•	Deliverables list (please use table 1.3b);
•	List of milestones (please use table 1.3c)
•	Description of each work package (please use table 1.3d)
•	Summary effort table (1.3e)
iv)	Provide a graphical presentation of the components showing their interdependencies (Pert diagram or similar)
v)	Describe any significant risks, and associated contingency plans

Note: The number of work packages used must be appropriate to the complexity of the work and the overall value of the proposed project. The planning should be sufficiently detailed to justify the proposed effort and allow progress monitoring by the Commission.

Overall strategy of the work plan [Torino] (1 page) 

The overall structure of the project can be broken down into two main segments, which temporally and logically follow one another. The first segment consists of the applied research effort delineated by the project description (*** which sections? ***), while the second segment is devoted to the dissemination of the scientific research results in a perspective of industrial production.

The scientific approach to the project is inspired by a three-step scientific research methodology.The first step of the methodology consists of the gathering of the preliminary data that constitute the input for the development of a conceptual model of the research object (second step). The development of the model is the basis for the development of a software architecture aimed at providing the services which constitute the goal of the project (third step). Concerning the perspective of technological and industrial progress, the project envisages a phase in which pilot productions are conducted, prior to the proper dissemination of the results, in order to assess the modalities through which the delivered software can support the actual productions. Dissemination and exploitation follow the pilot productions.

The first research work package (survey of authoring methods and of working practices in tools), WP1, will be devoted to the to survey of the methods adopted by authors for describing characters in storytelling and the methods enforced by the software tool designed to support the authoring process. In particular, the survey will account for evidence gathered from two important sources: on the one side, the analysis of a corpus of pre-production material from media production (television, cinema, etc.); on the one side, the up-to-date commercial tools for authoring will be analysed to extract authoring best practices. 

The following work package, WP2 (model of characters’ traits), aims at the design of a conceptual model of characters’ traits as they emerge from the survey. As a first step, the alternative definition of the characters will be systematised by classifying them - when possible - according  the narrative and drama theories that have been influential on authoring practices. This comprehensive knowledge, formalized in the form of an ontology to support its deployment in the subsequent phases of the project, will be accompanied by an investigation of the author requisites, conducted through the conceptual instruments acknowledged by the discipline of human-computer interaction. The comprehensive model of character definition will be then refined into a restricted model of characters’ traits that rea relevant for storytelling, inspired by the specification of the author requisites. The model obtained, validated through the simulations conducted in selected application scenarios, constitutes the basis for the  development of a software architecture for support of authoring, accomplished in WP3. 

WP3 (Engine design and implementation) consists of the design of a user interface (again, by accounting for the author requisites from the previous work package, as to better support authors’ creative process) and a software architecture for an engine that will assist the story creation from a character-based perspective. This engine will be based on the reuse of state-of-the-art reasoning and planning services aimed at supporting a simulation of the characters’ behaviour in the story, given the trait-based specification delivered by the WP2. The core engine will then be enriched by plug-ins and exporters designed for its use in the platforms and monolithic tools by which the pilot production will rely on. Testing and debugging will complete the work package.

WP4 (Pilot production) consists of a set of pilot productions, aimed at assessing, on the one side, the modalities through which the engine implemented in WP5 can assist and improve the authoring processes in storytelling media productions; on the other side, pilot productions will permit an evaluation of the extent to which the tool supports creativity, productivity and cost-effectiveness of the production process. This work package will also provide a user feedback to be incorporated in the cycle iterative design of the engine and of its interface.

WP5 (Dissemination) serves the purpose of propagating the results achieved by the project with regard to the model of characters’ traits and the engine build on the basis of this model. Dissemination will be conducted through the communication channels of the scientific and research communities to which the project is relevant and through the participation to the events and communities of industrial companies and professional users. This work package also includes the creation of a dedicated web forum and community to support the dissemination of the results and to promote a project-long discussion with the scientific and professional audiences. Web-based, collaborative platform will be the instruments for the delivery of software and documentation related with the project.

The exploitation of the results of the project (WP6, Exploitation) will be mainly supported by the adoption of the open-source paradigm of software distribution, as a main instrument to promote and encourage the use and customization of the character-based storytelling authoring engine and its integration into existing software tools and artefacts. *** to be completed ***

From the perspective of the project management, a dedicated work package (W0) will account for management issues. This work package, that will stretch along the entire duration of the project, will see to it that the appropriate communication and coordination occur among the partners thought the action of the technical and steering committees, by means of the project deliverable, milestones and progress reports. At the same time, this work package will take care of the communication and coordination between the project and the EU referents.

Work packages (5 pages, now 0)

•WP0: Management [VRMMP]
o	Internal communication and coordination (among partners and with committees, as functions of activities and results, communication, monitoring and self-evaluation) 
o	Communication and coordination with the EU
•WP1: Survey of existing approaches to authors’ methods for characters’ descriptions and biographies and software methods in new media productions [TEESSIDE]
o	T1.1 [CIRMA]: Analysis of a corpus of pre-production material from audiovisual and multimedia industry 
o	T1.2 [TEESSIDE]: Analysis of software approaches storytelling production 
•WP2: Devise of the model of characters’ traits in relation to narrative situations (values at stake, beliefs, emotional states) [CIRMA]
o	T2.1: [CWI]: (Language customization): identification of features from the survey
o	T2.2: [BBC] Analysis of the user requirements from authors
o	T2.3 [CIRMA]: Analysis of character traits wrt narrative models
o	T2.4: [TEESSIDE] Design of the character’s model 
o	T2.5: [CWI] Ontology encoding of the survey features *** must be placed immediately place after T2.1 ***
o	T2.6 [CIRMA] Evaluation of the model through scenario-based simulations
•WP3. Design and implementation of engine [VRMMP] *** responsibility for individual tasks missing (only for internal use) ***
o	T3.1 Design of interface for characters’ definition (input: characters’ traits ontology) [TEESSIDE]
o	T3.2 Define a software architecture for representation multiple characters’ behaviours [CWI] 
o	T3.3 Engine implementation [VRMMP]
o	T3.4 Interface to existing media production systems (e.g. visualizing system) [VRMMP]
o	T3.5 Engine test and debug [VRMMP]
o	T3.6 Evaluation of the engine [TEESSIDE]
•WP4. Pilot productions [VRMMP] *** responsibility for individual tasks missing (only for internal use) ***
o	T4.1 Description of the production activity that is consistent with the project goal and that can [SUBMARINE]
o	T4.2 Pilot test and production [BBC]
o	T4.3 Evaluation of the production [BBC]
•WP5. Dissemination [VRMMP]
o	Community website
o	Scientific community communication (publications)
o	Industrial community communication (fairs, shows)
•WP6. Exploitation [BBC]
	*** ??? ***

Table 1.3 a:	Template -  Work package list

Work package list 

Work package
No	Work package title	Type of activity	Lead 
partic
no.	Lead partic. short name	Person-months	Start
month	End
month8	

								

								

								
								
	TOTAL							

Table 1.3 b:	Template -  Deliverables List

List of Deliverables

Del. no. 	Deliverable name	WP no.	Nature	Dissemi-nation 
level
	Delivery date
(proj.
month)	

						

Table 1.3c Template - List of milestones 

Milestones
Milestones are control points where decisions are needed with regard to the next stage of the project. For example, a milestone may occur when a major result has been achieved, if its successful attainment is a required for the next phase of work. Another example would be a point when the consortium must decide which of several technologies to adopt for further development. 

Milestone number	Milestone name	Work package(s) involved	Expected date 	Means of verification	

					

Table 1.3 d:	Template - Work package description 

Work package description 

Work package number 		Start date or starting event:		
Work package title		
Activity type		
Participant number								
Participant short name								
Person-months per participant								

Objectives 

Description of work (possibly broken down into tasks) and role of partners

Deliverables (brief description) and month of delivery

	

Table 1.3e 	Summary of effort

Summary of effort
A summary of the effort is useful for the evaluators. Please indicate in the table number of person months over the whole duration of the planned work, for each work package by each participant. Identify the work-package leader for each WP by showing the relevant person-month figure in bold.

Partic. no.	Partic. short name	WP1	WP2	WP3	…	Total person months	
1							
2							
3							
etc							
Total							

PERT DIAGRAM 

Section 2.	Implementation [TORINO]
(Recommended length for Section 2.1 - five pages)

2.1	Management structure and procedures
Describe the organisational structure and decision-making mechanisms of the project. Show how they are matched to the complexity and scale of the project.

Project Internal Management
A consortium agreement will define two levels of Project management for the duration of the Project. The first one, the Technical Project Committee, takes care of Technical issues. Each work package is placed under the direct responsibility of a Work package Leader, belonging to the TPC. The Technical Project Committee reports to the Project Steering Committee (PSC), keeping it informed about the status of advancement of the Project. 
Project Steering Committee (PSC)
The Project Steering Committee consists of a signatory representative of each partner. The condition of membership is that this representative has sufficient authority within its organisation to take any corrective actions deemed necessary by the board. It is chaired by the Project Coordinator.

It is the responsibility of the Project Steering Committee:
•	to review project progress and assess project performance
•	to ensure the project maintains its technical objectives
•	to ensure the project maintains its relevance within the specific program
•	to resolve any technical, administrative or contractual issues where lower levels of the management structure have been unable to do so

Project Coordinator

The Project Coordinator  will oversee and co-ordinate all administrative aspects of the project. Its responsibilities in this respect are as follows:
•	to coordinate, collate and distribute all administrative and progress reports 
•	to maintain records of costs, resources and time-scales associated with the project
•	to collect and submit to the Commission all individual cost statements of the partners
•	to ensure prompt financial flows within the Consortium
•	to remain in contact with the Commission regarding all contractual and administrative aspects of the project
•	to maintain regular contact with all local administrative contacts 
•	to maintain regular contact and to meet regularly with the TPC to ensure effective progress of the project.
Technical Project Committee (TPC)
The Technical Project Committee is composed of two members from each of the organisations involved in the Consortium. 
The TPC sets up a project file for internal and external reference. It contains all approved technical documents, agendas, minutes of meetings and details of expenditure. 
The TPC is chaired by the Project Co-ordinator or by the Work Package Leader of the current Work Package. 
The TPC responsibilities will be as follows:
•	to maintain regular contact with the Work package Leaders in order to ensure effective progress of the project
•	to prepare and enforce the project operational planning
•	to review work progress
•	to check the technical consistency between work packages and tasks
•	to ensure that the overall project schedule is maintained through operational planning, and to anticipate and resolve deviations, whether from a technical or schedule standpoint
•	to negotiate and confirm dates, venues and content for Technical Reviews
•	to monitor the preparation, production and distribution of all deliverables
•	to report project progress at PSC and to report any problems as they arise
•	to ensure that all demands voiced in a technical review report are fully and promptly resolved
Decision Process

Project management decisions are taken by the PSC by majority vote of the present partners. Decisions for work programme and contract reviews and amendments, for information dissemination are reached unanimously. If a partner is defaulting, PSC decisions will be reached unanimously with the exception of the defaulting partner.
The PSC will meet at least two times in the first two years and four times in the last year of the project, for reviewing points and milestones. It may also be called together at the request of the project co-ordinator or any one of the members. At least one week before each meeting, the co-ordinator will notify all members of the scheduled meeting and proposes a detailed agenda containing all points on which PSC has to take a decision.

The TPC takes all the technical and operational decisions, under the guidance of the Work Package Leaders. The work package leaders will be under the supervision of the TPC.
The TCP will meet at start and end of each work package or at the request of any work package leader, not less than four times a year. All the decisions taken by the TPC will be under the consensus basis.  The TPC reports directly to the PSC and informs – through the Project Coordinator - the PSC of all the problems which, by its nature, are under the responsibility of the PSC and has to be solved at the highest level of decision of the project. 

Information flow
The necessary information flow will be produced inside the project in order to assure the precise information of every partner:
•	The Project Coordinator enforces the information flow between the PSC and the TPC and among the partners
•	All the partners provide the Co-ordinator with their administrative information in order to facilitate the necessary relationship with the European Commission.
•	All the partners provide the Work Package Leaders with the required information on resource management
•	The Work Package Leaders provide the required input and information to the partners involved in advancement of the work packages.
•	All documents produced in the project are made available to all partners.
•	Project documents will be whenever possible distributed through electronic means.
•	Free format communication and exchange between the various participants are encouraged
Planning and reporting
All strategic planning is taken by the PSC; the operational planning process are be taken by the TPC. 
Internal monitoring report are foreseen every two months and self-evaluation reports are foreseen every six months. coordinate, collate and distribute all administrative and progress reports. A project milestone is defined in month 18 for the mid-term audit. 
Deliverables Handling
The TPC will set up a project file for internal and external references. It will contain, apart of all approved technical documents, agendas, minutes of meetings and details of expenditure, the deliverables provided from the project. 
Contract Management
Before contract signature, the partners agree to sign a consortium agreement that will govern their relations during the project.

2.2	Individual participants 
(Maximum length for Section 2.2: one page per participant. However, where two or more departments within an organisation have quite distinct roles within the proposal, one page per department is acceptable.
The maximum length applying to a legal entity composed of several members, each of which is a separate legal entity, is one page per member, provided that the members have quite distinct roles within the proposal.)

For each participant in the proposed project, provide a brief description of the legal entity, the main tasks they have been attributed, and the previous experience relevant to those tasks. Provide also a short profile of the individuals who will be undertaking the work.

[1 page per partner]

BBC 

CIRMA – UNIVERSITY OF TORINO
Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca sulla Multimedialità e l’Audiovisivo (CIRMA)
http://www.cirma.unito.it/index.html 

CIRMA is a research center of the University of Turin that includes three participant departments: the departement of Computer Science (Dipartimento di Informatica), the department of the Disciplines of Fine Arts, Music and Drama (Dipartimento delle Discipline dell’Arte, della Musica e dello Spettacolo) and the Department of Literary and Philological Sciences. It includes scholars from the three departments, with research and lecturing positions at the University of Turin.

The mission of CIRMA is to carry on and promote research of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary kinds on audiovisuals and multimedia, with a particular focus on their relationships with the traditional media of artistic production, including practical applications.
The CIRMA, with resources from public and private institutions (Università degli Studi di Torino, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, European Union), develops, coordinates and promotes research activities, participates into training programmes in the areas of competence, contributes to the communication between scholars in the new media area, and disseminate results as widely as possible. The CIRMA has collaborations with other research labs all over the world (quali?), with undergraduate and graduate programmes, with the audiovisual and multimedia industry.

Past projects in which CIRMA was involved span from cultural heritage to virtual reality and musicwas include the Dramatour project, sponsored by Italian Ministry of Culture and Cultural Heritage (a virtual guide for the Savoy apartments at Palazzo Chiablese in Turin), the Virtual Electronic Poem project, sponsored by the European Union under the VI Framework Program (a VR reconstruction of the Poème électronique (1958) by Le Corbusier, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis), the GeoGraphy project (a graph-based algorithmic compositional system), and the Alternando project (a concert-performance featuring algorithmic control of musical composition, video processing and piano playing). Other projects?

People

Vincenzo Lombardo is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Turin (School of Fine Arts, Music and Drama). He is the President of CIRMA. He leads an applied research group at the Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park SpA on Multimedia Production in Interactive Computer Graphics. Also, he is involved in commercial multimedia productions for communication and promotion (Fiorita Officine, W&Media). He has been involved as coordinator in several research projects, including EU VI framework projects. 

Antonio Pizzo is an Associate Professor in Theatre and Drama at the University of Turin, where he teaches courses in Contemporary Drama and in Procedural Drama. He is an author and director of drama and a consultant in the production of events. He is a specialist of Vernacular drama in Naples. In the last decade, he has been investigating the relationships between new media and drama through essays and projects (Officine Sintetiche 2008 project, production Workshop of Digital Performing Arts, "Membrana a Torino" project, 2007, production workshop directed by Marcel lì Antunez Roca).

Rossana Damiano is a Researcher in Computer Science at the University of Turin (School of Fine Arts, Music and Drama). She graduated in Communication Studies in1997 and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the same university in 2001. Her research interests span from intelligent agents and agent communication languages to interactive drama and storytelling. She participated in several application research projects in Natural Language and Multimedia.

Relevant publications:

Rossana Damiano, Vincenzo Lombardo, Antonio Pizzo, Formal encoding of drama 
ontology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3805, Springer, 2005, pp. 95-104.

Rossana Damiano, Vincenzo Lombardo, Antonio Pizzo, Fabrizio Nunnari, 
Dramatization Meets Narrative Presentations, 17th European Conference on Artificial 
Intelligence (ECAI 2006), IOS Press, Riva del Garda, 2006, pp. 31-35. 

Vincenzo Lombardo, Andrea Valle, Fabrizio Nunnari, Francesco Giordana, Andrea 
Arghinenti, Archeology of Multimedia, Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia 
Conference 2006 (ACM-MM 2006), Santa Barbara (CA), pp. 269-278, Best Art Paper 
Prize. 

Andrea Valle, Vincenzo Lombardo, Hairi Vogel, Alternating from 1 to x and vice 
versa, Proceedings of the 15th ACM International conference on Multimedia, Augsburg 
(Germany), 2007, pp. 922 – 931.  

CWI 
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Netherlands 

The Semantic Media Interfaces group at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer science (CWI) carries out research on improving models and tools for presenting multimedia information to end-users on a variety of platforms. CWI is the research institute for mathematics and computer science research in the Netherlands. CWI's mission is twofold: to perform frontier research in mathematics and computer science, and to transfer new knowledge in these fields to society in general and trade and industry in particular. CWI has always been very successful in securing considerable participation in European research programs and has extensive experience in managing these international collaborative research efforts. CWI is also strongly embedded in Dutch university research: about twenty of its senior researchers hold part-time positions as university professors and several projects are carried out in cooperation with university research groups.  In addition, CWI has strong links to the World Wide Web consortium, and houses the Benelux office.

CWI has a staff of 210 fte (full time equivalent), 160 of whom are scientific staff. CWI operates on an annual budget of EURO 13M. CWI's research is organized in research themes, including:  Datamining and Knowledge Discovery, Semantic Media Interfaces and Visualization and 3D Interfaces.

Key Persons:
Prof. Dr. Lynda Hardman is the head of the Semantic Media Interfaces group and part-time full professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven.  She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1998, having graduated in Mathematics and Physics from Glasgow University in 1982.   During her time in the software industry she was the development manager for Guide, the first hypertext authoring system for personal computers (1986). Her favourite chocolates are from Puccini, Amsterdam.

Dr. Jacco van Ossenbruggen is a senior researcher, having obtained his PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2001. He was a member of the W3C working group that developed the SMIL recommendation. He is currently active in the MultimediaN E-culture Project, which won the first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge at ISWC ’06. His current research interests include multimedia on the Semantic Web and the exploration of heterogeneous media repositories.

Dr. Zeljko Obrenovic is a researcher, having obtained his PhD from the University of Belgrade in 2004. His current research interests include design of interactive systems, universal accessibility, software engineering, service-oriented computing and semantic web. He was a member of the W3C Incubator Group on Multimedia Semantics and is a guest lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Dr. Frank Nack is the researcher and lecturer in the Human-Computer Studies Group (HCS) at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is also an associated member of the Semantic Media Interfaces theme at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI). His research interests include the representation, retrieval and reuse of media in hypermedia systems, context and process aware media knowledge spaces, representation and adaptation of experiences, interactive storytelling, and computational applications of media theory and semiotics. He was responsible for research on MPEG-7,  MPEG-4, and is associated editor in chief for IEEE MultiMedia. He also serves on the board for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

SUBMARINE 

UNIVERSITY OF TEESSIDE

The School of Computing of the University of Teesside has been active in the field of Interactive Storytelling since 2000 and is recognised internationally for its research and the specific approach it has developed, “character-based interactive storytelling” [1].
This research was awarded the “best paper prize” at the First International Conference on Virtual Storytelling in 2001, and again at the Second International Conference on Virtual Storytelling in 2003. Its results have been regularly published in the best international conferences (ACM AAMAS 2002 [2]; 2004 [3], ACM Multimedia 2007 [4]) and journals (IEEE Intelligent Systems [1], IEEE Multimedia), and some of these publications are amongst the most cited in the field according to Google Scholar. 
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=interactive+storytelling&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

A complete set of Interactive Storytelling publications available at: 
http://www-scm.tees.ac.uk/users/f.charles/

Teesside has been involved in several research projects on Interactive Storytelling in partnership with industry, both computer games industry and traditional media. The BARDS project (a UK DTI Technology Programme) investigates Interactive Storytelling for the future generation of computer games, in partnership with Eidos Interactive Ltd, one of the largest independent games company in Europe. 
In the CALLAS project (FP6, IST-2005-034800), Teesside is working alongside the BBC to develop Interactive Storytelling for Interactive TV applications. 
Examples from Teesside’s research in Interactive Storytelling have been used to illustrate courses in computer animation and multimedia in several universities worldwide, in the USA, Germany, Finland, etc. This research and its potential applications have been featured in the national and international press, among which the Daily Telegraph, The Times “T2”, Le Monde (France), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), Radio France Internationale, the Danish national radio, the Belgian Television, Game On TV, and the ACM News.  

CV of Principal Investigator
Marc Cavazza is Professor of Intelligent Virtual Environments at the University of Teesside. He has published over 170 papers in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Systems, 30 of which on Interactive Storytelling. He has been an invited speaker on Interactive Storytelling at various conferences, including the ACM Virtual Reality Software and Technology 2003 (Osaka, Japan), Imagina 2003 and 2005 (Monte Carlo), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) 2006, Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) 2007 and Immerscom 2007.
He has served on the programme committee of most conferences on Interactive Storytelling and virtual agents since 2001, including the International Conference on Virtual Storytelling (ICVS) 2001, 2003; Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (Senior Programme Committee for 2008); TIDSE 2003, 2004, 2006; ACM Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agents Systems (AAMAS) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (Senior Programme Committee for 2008); ACM Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) 2005, 2006, 2007; etc. In 2007, he was co-chair (with Stephane Donikian) of the International Conference on Virtual Storytelling. 
He was project co-ordinator for the ALTERNE FP5 project on Virtual Reality Art (IST-2001-38575) and is currently involved in the FP6 Integrated Projects CALLAS (IST-2005-34800) and COMPANIONS (IST-2005-34434).
References
[1] Cavazza, M., Charles, F. and Mead, S.J., 2002. Character-based Interactive Storytelling. IEEE Intelligent Systems, special issue on AI in Interactive Entertainment, pp. 17-24.
[2] Cavazza, M., Charles, F. and Mead, S.J., 2002. Interacting with Virtual Characters in Interactive Storytelling. First ACM Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Bologna, Italy, pp. 318-325.
[3] Charles, F. and Cavazza, M., 2004. Exploring the Scalability of Character-based Storytelling. Third ACM Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, New York, USA, pp. 872-879.

VRMMP
VR&MM Park - Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park S.p.A

Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park is a technology park focusing on new technologies for multimedia and virtual reality applications. It’s main domains of activity are the fields of movie and TV production, and it has now opened to a broader range of applications, with particular attention to the use of virtual reality in industrial training processes and in the bio-medical domain. The park has also an intense training activity based on the key technologies the park is dedicated to.
The VR&MM Park laboratories are dedicated to designing and implementing 3D interactive applications for different domains, ranging from process industry, landscape management, art & technology
Currently, Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park is involved in some key research projects funded under the 6th Framework Programme, like VIRTHUALIS (www.virthualis.org, in which the VR&MM Park is leading the whole technical development) and CITIZEN MEDIA (www.ist-citizenmedia.org in which VR&MM Park is mainly focusing on creating interactive 3D applications for mobile devices). Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park has also recently completed the first release of NeuroVR (www.neurovr.org), together with Istituto Auxologico Italiano.
In the past the VR&MM Park participated to projects focusing on the cultural heritage, among them: DramaTour (http://dramatour.di.unito.it, in which the VR&MM Park lead the whole technical development and the content production) and the Virtual Electronic Poem (http://www.edu.vrmmp.it/vep/, where the VR&MM Park developed the visualization module and lead the overall software integration).

Participants

Vincenzo Lombardo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the School of Multimedia and Arts of the University of Turin. He owns a degree in Computer Science at the University of Torino, and a PhD in Computer Science from the conjoined Turin-Milan PhD Programme. His current research areas are Natural Language Processing (syntax, parsing, computational psycholinguistics), AI for the representation of drama, computer music.

Fabrizio Nunnari received in 2005 a PhD in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin. He is currently working as researcher and developer at the ASA-Lab at the Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park. His main research topics are: information visualization through the use of Virtual Reality techniques, systems and architectures for Virtual Reality and multimedia systems.

Pino Cappellano. In 2000 he graduated in Dams (Art, music and spectacle disciplines), in 2004 in Multidams (Art, music, spectacle and multimedia disciplines) and in 2006/07 was researcher for the “Project Lagrange”. Currently he is working at Asa-Lab at Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park. He is interested in visual design and art direction for Virtual Reality and multimedia systems.

Filippo Casale is a professional in the field of 3D visualization. In 1994 he graduated in Industrial design provided from Ied (European Design Institute) Milano. Since 1997 he worked on and coordinated many 3D animated visual productions of several genres, including spot, short movies, and general presentations. Among his clients there are many well-known brands of the automotive and industrial sectors. Since 2000 he is Maya trainer certified by Alias and conduces an intensive teaching activity in both the industry and the academia. Since 2006 he works at the Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park as both technical director and teacher.

2.3	Consortium as a whole [TORINO]
(No recommended length for Section 2.3 – depends on the size and complexity of the consortium)

Describe how the participants collectively constitute a consortium capable of achieving the project objectives, and how they are suited and are committed to the tasks assigned to them. Show the complementarity between participants. Explain how the composition of the consortium is well-balanced in relation to the objectives of the project.
If appropriate describe the industrial/commercial involvement to ensure exploitation of the results. 

i) Sub-contracting: If any part of the work is to be sub-contracted by the participant responsible for it, describe the work involved and explain why a sub-contract approach has been chosen for it.
ii) Other countries: If a one or more of the participants requesting EU funding is based outside of the EU Member states, Associated countries and the list of International Cooperation Partner Countries, explain in terms of the project’s objectives why such funding would be essential.

The consortium of the ADRIAN project consists of research institutions (CIRMA-University of Torino, CWI-Amsterdam, University of Teesside), two applied research centres (… 

The model of the character’s traits will be developed by the research institutions … these will also 

Software integration

2.4	Resources to be committed [TORINO]
(Recommended length for Section 2.4 – two pages)

Describe how the totality of the necessary resources will be mobilised, including any resources that will complement the EC contribution. Show how the resources will be integrated in a coherent way, and show how the overall financial plan for the project is adequate.

In addition to the costs indicated on form A3 of the proposal, and the effort shown in section 1.3 above, please identify any other major costs (e.g. equipment). Ensure that the figures stated in Part B are consistent with these.

***FROM OTHER***
The budget directly devoted to the management of the project should cover:
- The Steering Committee meetings organisation
- The Management Workshop organisation
- Gender issues and child-care during the meetings
- Exchanges between the partners, which is absolutely required to favour the exchange of
knowledge in our highly interdisciplinary group.
- salary for a project manager
- the international workshop

Section 3.	Impact
(Recommended length for the whole of Section 3 – ten pages)

3.1	Expected impacts listed in the work programme
Describe how your project will contribute towards the expected impacts listed in the work programme in relation to the topic or topics in question. Mention the steps that will be needed to bring about these impacts. Explain why this contribution requires a European (rather than a national or local) approach. Indicate how account is taken of other national or international research activities. Mention any assumptions and external factors that may determine whether the impacts will be achieved.

--- rossana ---

3.1 IMPACT
[instructions from the template in square brackets] keyword from the call in bold, the same order as in the call

please comment amend integrate!!!

[Describe how your project will contribute towards the expected impacts listed in the work programme in relation to the topic or topics in question.]

keywords: content production and consumption – knowledge and learning – many-to-many models

Storytelling has been pointed out as an effective modality for presenting and conveying information in a highly compact and understandable form (Gershon-Page 2001). For these reasons, storytelling has been successfully applied to practical systems the fields of education and training (FearNot, Mission Rehearsal and subsequent projects, Carmen’s bright ideas) and cultural heritage mediation (Dramatour project, other narrative systems from ICVS), often associated to  the related notion of drama to enhance the engagement of the users. The use of artificial characters has been proved to substantially improve the effectiveness and naturalness of the interaction with such systems, allowing the users to establish an emotional bond with the system, possibly mediated by the process of identification favoured by human-like appearance and believable behaviour. A major bottleneck of these systems, however, is constituted by authoring. While story- and character-based systems  are designed and programmed by interdisciplinary teams of AI experts, HCI experts, knowledge engineers and programmers, content authors are scarcely involved in the development and testing loop, so that the creation of contents requires extensive training of the authors, who are provided insufficient and poor instruments to support their creativity, not to speak of non-specialized content creators for enforcing universal access to authoring in many-to-many schemas of knowledge creation, reuse and dissemination.

Based on the assumption, amply disussed and argued for in the parts … of this proposal, that a character-centered approach is necessary to enhance the authoring of story- and drama-based systems and application (spanning from traditional media to new media through a variety of formats and applications), the ADRIAN project aims at dramatically improving the processes of content creation and authoring in storytelling by using the instruments of AI to  support the creative process. Cost effectiveness derives from the use of off-the-shelf AI techniques technologies for planning and reasoning to address exploratory activities in the creative process, aimed at improving the quality of the output and the development time. The use of a corpus-based ontology story-related character features, collectively negotiated and tested among the participants of the creative workflow process,  guarantee the shared understanding of the applications elementary and compound content elements, favouring their reuse and recombination across systems and applications. The resort to semantic annotation of contents makes them easily reused by human content creators and automatic and semi-automatic content assemblers. Semantic annotation in character-based storytelling systems is also the key to personalization, for what concern both the distributed content (which would support forms of context- and ambient-based adaptation and personalization, mostly in the presence of wireless, large band networks in ubiquitous computing scenarios) and the individual preferences of users concerning the character mediation in the content distribution itself (in line with the advancements of user modelling). 

In the long term, the establishment of AI-based platforms for character-based storytelling across different development and exploitation scenarios provide undoubtedly valuable benchmarks for the validation of the AI techniques and models involved, with a specific concern for the techniques for addressing the complexity issues in real systems, such as computer-tractable knowledge about story structures and complex, believable characters and the interaction among the two. In particular, it provides a test bed for the effectiveness of the models of characters (expressiveness, realism, persistent traits and cognitive models) created by the interdisciplinary research on artificial characters posited at the junction of psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and social studies. 

[Mention the steps that will be needed to bring about these impacts.] 

The engineering of the software instruments designed and implemented in the project is a necessary step to ensure their easy and immediate fruition on the largest possible articulation of software and hardware configurations. The adoption of an open-source software development schema is the key to the integration and testing of the solutions envisaged by the project within the context of commercial content development (and distribution) platforms and devices, ranging from professional tools for advanced authoring of multimedia presentations, videogame design, scripting of tv / cinema / new media products and formats, to the individual and collective creation of contents by end-users.

[Explain why this contribution requires a European (rather than a national or local) approach. ]

???

[Indicate how account is taken of other national or international research activities. ]

???

[Mention any assumptions and external factors that may determine whether the impacts will be achieved.]

Perspective in the economical development of the new media and game industry in Europe. Advancement of computational resources commonly available for graphical generation in support of realtime character-based applications. Establishment of shared workflows in media and multimedia production on which the development of the models in the project and their implementation can rey on, suitable for later dissemination of the result.  Persistence of the open-source paradigm in software development. Expansion of the market of new media and multimedia products, personal & portable devices and in general of platforms that can bring new interest in character-centered storytelling techniques. 

3.2	Dissemination and/or exploitation of project results, and management of intellectual property
Describe the measures you propose for the dissemination and/or exploitation of project results, and the management of knowledge, of intellectual property, and of other innovation-related activities arising from the project.

Summary
In this section we describe the area in which the dissemination and exploitation activity will be carried out: from the scientific community to the law science community, from EU and National institutions to to the private sector (publishers and lawyers). It describes the contacts available*** to the parnters which will be used in the exploitation and the actions that will be taken.
Moreover, the project will provide a specification document and a business plan to describe how to localize the developed framework in further languages and domains.

***management of intellectual property ??? ***

Dissemination Plan

Results from the ADRIAN project should be of broad interest to various constituencies, from the traditional Storytelling research community to content providers and the entertainment industry. This is why the dissemination plan is organised according to the various target audience. The dissemination plan will address several routes, from traditional scientific publication to event organisation or contacts with the press.

Scientific Publication

The following scientific publications will be targeted by the consortium:

Journals: ACM Computers In Entertainment, IEEE Multimedia, Artificial Intelligence Journal (Elsevier).

Conferences: Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (sponsored by AAAI), European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ACM Multimedia, ACM Advances in Computer Entertainment, IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ACM Siggraph Symposia (on Games and Interactive 3D Systems), International Conference on Virtual Storytelling (Proceedings in Springer LNCS), ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Professional Conferences

Presentation of recent advances in technology for the Entertainment industry tends to take place as specialised industrial events rather than through mainstream scientific conferences. One traditional example is the Games Developers Conference (www.gdconf.com). In recent years academic presentations targeting the entertainment industry have been invited at these venues, and the project plans to present its results in that context as well. Other targeted conferences of this genre are the Australian Game Developers Conference (www.agdc.com.au), and the IBC (www.ibc.org) in Amsterdam.

Participation in events / organisation of events

SOMEONE ELSE ???

Several investigators of this proposal (Cavazza, ...) are actively involved with the most important Entertainment Computing conferences (e.g., IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing)

Traditional dissemination : web site

The ADRIAN project will promote and maintain a project-specific web site. This site will be populated by background research from various partners in addition to the specific infeed from the ADRIAN results.
In order to reduce the cost and the effort of the site management, the web site will be based on one of the many freely available open-source Content Management Systems (CMSs), such as : Drupal (www.drupal.org), joomla (www.joomla.org) or wordpress (www.wordpress.org).
These systems offer different forms of content distribution (plain pages, picture galleries, downloadable files, blog, forums, polls, ...) as well as a user access control mechanism. The latter, makes these system also suitable to improve the cooperation of the various distributed teams.

Web 2.0 dissemination
The Interactive Storytelling productions and other forms of media experiences that can be recorded as video, as well as 3D animations which correspond to the media content of some of the Interactive Narratives generated will also be disseminated via Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube™ or Dailymotion™. This is expected to improve the ADRIAN project outreach to the general public.
Press and Media 

TO FILL WITH PROPER COMPETENCES!

Several of the investigators from the ADRIAN consortium have already a significant experience of media coverage, though such media as; major newspapers (...), radio stations (e.g, ...) and Television (...). Television broadcasting is ensured since some of the partners belongs to the television broadcasting industry (RAI, BBC).
It is envisioned that traditional media’s interest will be in Future Entertainment paradigms and in the societal implications of such entertainment. While dissemination to traditional media is certainly an asset, care will be taken that the message disseminated is consistent with the best practice in scientific research.

Section 4.	Ethical Issues
(No recommended length for Section 4 – depends on the number and complexity of the ethical issues involved)

Describe any ethical issues that may arise in their proposal. In particular, you should explain the benefit and burden of their experiments and the effects it may have on the research subject. The following special issues should be taken into account:

Informed consent: When describing issues relating to informed consent, it will be necessary to illustrate an appropriate level of ethical sensitivity, and consider issues of insurance, incidental findings and the consequences of leaving the study.

Data protection issues: Avoid the unnecessary collection and use of personal data.  Identify the source of the data, describing whether it is collected as part of the research or is previously collected data being used.  Consider issues of informed consent for any data being used.  Describe how personal identify of the data is protected.

Use of animals: Where animals are used in research the application of the 3Rs (Replace, Reduce, Refine) must be convincingly addressed.  Numbers of animals should be specified.  State what happens to the animals after the research experiments.

Human embryonic stem cells: Research proposals that will involve human embryonic stem cells (hESC) will have to address all the following specific points:
•	the necessity to use hESC in order to achieve the scientific objectives set forth in the proposal.
•	whether the applicants have taken into account the legislation, regulations, ethical rules and/or codes of conduct in place in the country(ies) where the research using hESC is to take place, including the procedures for obtaining informed consent;
•	the source of the hESC
•	the measures taken to protect personal data, including genetic data, and privacy;
•	the nature of financial inducements, if any.

Identify the countries where research will be undertaken and which ethical committees and regulatory organisations will need to be approached during the life of the project.

Include the Ethical issues table below.  If you indicate YES to any issue, please identify the pages in the proposal where this ethical issue is described. If you are sure that none of the issues apply to your proposal, simply tick the YES box in the last row.

Notes:
1. For further information on ethical issues relevant to ICT, see annex 5 of the Guide for applicants.
2. Only in exceptional cases will additional information be sought for clarification, which means that any ethical review will be performed solely on the basis of the information available in your proposal.

ETHICAL ISSUES TABLE

	YES	PAGE	
Informed Consent			
•	Does the proposal involve children? 			
•	Does the proposal involve patients or persons not able to give consent?			
•	Does the proposal involve adult healthy volunteers?			
•	Does the proposal involve Human Genetic Material?			
•	Does the proposal involve Human biological samples?			
•	Does the proposal involve Human data collection?			
Research on Human embryo/foetus			
•	Does the proposal involve Human Embryos?			
•	Does the proposal involve Human Foetal Tissue / Cells?			
•	Does the proposal involve Human Embryonic Stem Cells?			
Privacy			
•	Does the proposal involve processing of genetic information or personal data (eg. health, sexual lifestyle, ethnicity, political opinion, religious or philosophical conviction)			
•	Does the proposal involve tracking the location or observation of people?			
Research on Animals			
•	Does the proposal involve research on animals?			
•	Are those animals transgenic small laboratory animals?			
•	Are those animals transgenic farm animals?			
•	Are those animals cloned farm animals?			
•	Are those animals non-human primates? 			
Research Involving Developing Countries			
•	Use of local resources (genetic, animal, plant etc)			
•	Impact on local community			
Dual Use 			
•	Research having direct military application 			
•	Research having the potential for terrorist abuse			
ICT Implants			
•	Does the proposal involve clinical trials of ICT implants? 			
I CONFIRM THAT NONE OF THE ABOVE ISSUES APPLY TO MY PROPOSAL