Employing ai methods to control the behavior of animated interface agents

Life-like characters are increasingly gaining the attention of researchers and commercial developers of user interfaces. A strong argument for using characters in the interface is that they enrich the repertoire of available options which allow to emulate more familiar communication styles for interacting with a computer. The focus of our work is on lifelike presentation agents. In this contribution, we present a framework for the development of presentation agents which can be utilized for a broad range of applications including personalized information delivery from the WWW.