Smart(er) Animated Agents As real-time characters become almost commonplace, the next challenge is to make those characters interact with real people. Interactions should be through the modalities that real people share, especially language, gesture, and shared perceptions of the world. This course explored several ways to give real-time, animated, embodied characters more intelligence and communication skills so that they can act, react, make decisions, and take initiatives. It also addressed applications to collaborative groups, interactive training, and smarter games.   Organizer Norm Badler University of Pennsylvania   Lecturers Justine Cassell Massachusetts Institute of Technology   Barbara Hayes-Roth Stanford University   W. Lewis Johnson Jeff Rickel University of Southern California   James Lester North Carolina State University