Outline of present research and projects:
The first aim of my current research is to model the psychological concept of autobiographic memory computationally and integrate it into other existing synthetic agent architectures. I investigate how agents' goal structure, emotion, and attention processes can be interrelated with and influenced by autobiographic knowledge. With this memory included, agents are not only capable of recognising significant events which originate in the agents' own experiences, but can also remember, recall and learn from these experiences. This work is a key aspect in the European FP6 project eCIRCUS (Education through characters with emotional-intelligence and role-playing capabilities that understand social interaction) that is funding my current Research Fellow position. My research increases the agents' believability and the interactivity of the software we develop in the eCIRCUS project which makes the interactions of children with the software more fulfilling for the user.
As a Research Fellow in eCIRCUS I also deputise for Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn (the Principal Investigator of the project at Univ. of Hertfordshire) at project meetings and reviews and assist with some the research administration involved in the project.
Emergent Narrative (EN) in virtual storytelling systems and games is another research area I am currently working on. EN pursues an autonomous-character-based approach for the construction of stories in a highly flexible real-time environment, as opposed to a 'plot driven' approach. Users' active involvement in the story is significantly taken into account and thus the authoring activities are minimised. The overall aim in EN research is to find out a narrative structure which enhances the entertainment value for better storytelling and user experience.
From March 2008 I started to participate in the LIREC (LIving with Robots and InteractivE Companions) project as a technical advisor. My role is to participate the design of agent companion architecture with long-term autobiographic memory, and the technical and experiment scenario design of migrating agents. In the LIREC project, I started working with different types of robots which are intended to interact with human-users in a natural household environment. We aim to investigate uses' perception to robots as their personal companion. Meanwhile we are carrying out research in using robots as a mediator to facilitate interaction between human users.

Past research projects:

ELVIS (E-Learning with Virtual Interactive Synthetic characters)
My PhD research was partly supported by participating in an international project ELVIS, which is funded by Asia IT&C (Asia-Information Technology and Communications).
Started from April 2003 the European project ELVIS, collaborating institutions are University of Salford, INESC and Zhejiang University. The ambitious goal of the project is to produce closer links between China and EU countries in the use of 3D interactive graphic environments for e-Learning in schools. Here at University of Hertfordshire the team is a joint Computer Science/Psychology group, including myself, Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, and Sarah Woods.
If you are interested in the area of virtual interactive synthetic characters, you can also visit the project VICTEC (Virtual ICT using Empathic Characters in Schools) website, since ELVIS is an extension of it.

Plagiarism Detection and Prevention
I was working for a project titled Plagiarism Detection and Prevention at the beginning of year 2003, carried on by the Plagiarism Detection Group from the Department of Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire. The project mainly focuses on developing a local plagiarism detection tool Ferret, and later it will be compared with commercial plagiarism detection product Turnitin from JISC. This project is supported by Learning and Teaching Development Fund.
The outcome of my work will be the improvement of the Ferret tool by extending the capability to web searching. For myself, I gained a lot of valuable experiences such as creating a large application program with different modules and problem solving with integrating different works from different people.