2012
Department of the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award
Clarke Lethin was recognized for his exceptional performance while assigned as the Human Performance, Training and Education Thrust Manager with the Office of Naval Research.
Kurzweil Prize for Best Paper at Artificial General Intelligence Conference 2012
Paul Rosenbloom won for his paper, Deconstructing Reinforcement Learning in Sigma.
Best Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Motion in Games
Ari Shapiro and Andrew W. Feng won for their paper, “Automating the Transfer of a Generic Set of Behaviors onto a Virtual Character.”
Film Credit on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Paul Debevec earned a credit for his visiting researcher work at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.
Best Poster Award at the USC Computer Science Department Annual Research Review
Celso de Melo won Best Poster for Technical Strength.
Best Poster Award at the 24th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference
Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski and David Traum won for their poster, Evaluating Conversational Characters through Question Generation.
Best Demo Award at IEEE Virtual Reality
The Mixed Reality Lab won for FOV2GO, a fold-out 3-D viewer for the the creation of immersive virtual reality experiences using smartphones.
Honorable Mention at IEEE Virtual Reality
Evan Suma and David Krum earned an honorable mention for their paper, Impossible Spaces: Maximizing natural walking in virtual environments with self-overlapping architecture.
Honorable Mention at IEEE Virtual Reality
Adam Jones earned an honorable mention for his poster, Depth Judgments by Reaching and Matching in Near-Field Augmented Reality.
Honorary Award from the National Academy of Video Game Testers and Reviewers
Skip Rizzo honored for his use of virtual reality, motion control, and gaming technologies in pain distraction for surgery and chemotherapy, as well as for training, stress relief, and rehabilitation of cognition and memory loss.
Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award
Morteza Dehghani won this award to study the formation of sacred values.
17th Annual Satava Award for Lifetime Achievement in Medical Simulation
Awarded to Skip Rizzo at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference.
2011
Maneuver Center of Excellence Award for Excellence
Matthew Trimmer, Julia Campbell and Kip Haynes won in recognition of the Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment (ELITE).
2011 Help Group Summit Professional Achievement Award
Awarded to Skip Rizzo for “outstanding contribution in the field of VR technology” at the Help Group Summit, an organization and conference involved with providing care for children with developmental disabilities.
Best Paper Award at IITSEC 2011
Belinda Lange, Skip Rizzo, Chien-Yen Chang, Evan Suma and Mark Bolas won for their paper Markerless Full Body Tracking: Depth-sensing Technology within Virtual Environments
First Place in the Video Sub-Challenge of the Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge at the ACII 2011 Conference
Geovany Ramirez, Tadas Baltrusaitis and Louis-Philippe Morency won for their paper entitled Modeling Latent Discriminative Dynamic of Multi-Dimensional Affective Signals.
Best Poster Award at the Wireless Health Conference
Ming-Chun Huang, Ethen Chen, Chien-Yen Chang, Belinda Lange and Majid Sarrafzadeh won for their poster entitled Gaming for Upper Extremities Rehabilitation.
Best Poster Award at the USC Annual Research Review
Derya Ozkan, Kenji Sagae and Louis-Philippe Morency won for their poster entitled Latent Mixture of Discriminative Experts for Multimodal Prediction Modeling.
Best Paper Award at the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2011)
Jason Tsai, Emma Bowring, Stacy Marsella and Milind Tambe won for their paper entitled Empirical Evaluation of Computational Emotional Contagion Models.
Kurzweil Prize for Best Artificial General Intelligence Idea at the Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AGI-11)
Paul Rosenbloom won for his paper From Memory to Problem Solving: Mechanism Reuse in a Graphical Cognitive Architecture.
Best Paper Award at the Human-Computer Interaction International Conference
Luke Yeh, Belinda Lange and Skip Rizzo won for their paper Emotions and Telerehabilitation: Pilot Clinical Trials for Virtual Telerehabilitation Application Using Haptic Device and its Impact on Post Stroke Patients’ Mood and Motivation.
Best Paper Award at the 8th IEEE International Workshop in Projector-Camera Systems (PROCAMS 2011)
Joel Jurik, Andrew Jones, Mark Bolas and Paul Debevec won for their paper Prototyping a Light Field Display Involving Direct Observation of a Video Projector Array.
New Investigator Award at the 16th Annual CyberTherapy and CyberPsychology Conference
Sin-Hwa Kang won for her paper People Like Virtual Counselors That Highly Disclose About Themselves (co-authored by Jonathan Gratch).
Best Poster Award at the 24th Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-24)
Grace Chen, Emma Tosch, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski and David Traum won for their poster, Evaluating Conversational Characters Created through Question Generation.
Best Tech-Note Award at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces
Evan Suma, David Krum and Mark Bolas won for their tech-note Effects of Redirection on Spatial Orientation in Real and Virtual Environments.
2nd Place in the Patterns of Life category of the Federal Virtual World Challenge at the Defense GameTech Conference
Jacki Morie, Dusan Jan and Anton Leuski (VIGOR Team) won for their character-driven checkpoint training exercise.
Finalist for Best Paper Award at FLAIRS 24
William Yang Wang, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski and David Traum were selected for their paper Improving Spoken Dialogue Understanding using Phonetic Mixture Models as one of nine finalists out of 179 submissions.
2010
American Psychological Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Practice of Trauma Psychology
Skip Rizzo, Barbara Rothbaum, JoAnn Difede and Greg Reger won for their work with Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan for PTSD Exposure Therapy.
AAAI recognition of AI Application
Anton Leuski and David Traum for their paper Practical Language Understanding for Virtual Humans.
Jacki Morie named Director-at-Large of ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee.
Best Paper Award at the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
Lixing Huang, Louis-Philippe Morency, Jon Gratch won for their paper Parasocial Consensus Sampling: Combining Multiple Perspectives to Learn Virtual Human Behavior.
ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Award at the AAMAS Awards
Jon Gratch and Stacy Marsella for significant and sustained contributions to autonomous agents and multiagent systems in the area of virtual agents, in particular in emotion modeling and social simulation.
IAAI Deployed Application Award
Anton Leuski and David Traum won for their paper Practical Language Processing for Virtual Humans at the 22nd Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Shri Narayanan and Chul Min Lee won for their paper Toward detecting emotions in spoken dialogs.
Shri Narayanan named Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Shri Narayanan named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Best Paper Award at I/ITSEC 2010
Patrick Kenny, Thomas Parsons and Pat Garrity won for their paper Virtual Patients for Virtual Sick Call Medical Training.
2009
Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award
Awarded to William Swartout by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2009)
Mei Si, Stacy Marsella, and David Pynadath won for their paper Directorial Control in a Decision-Theoretic Framework for Interactive Narrative.
Louis-Philippe Morency received an Advisory Board Commendation at the 11th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI-MLMI 2009)
Best Paper Award at the 2009 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2009)
Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Ning Wang, Brooke Stankovic won for their paper, Assessing the validity of appraisal-based models of emotion.
Intellectual Leadership Award from the Greater Los Angeles Area chapter of MENSA (GLAAM) awarded to Skip Rizzo.
Paul Debevec named CGI Pioneer by 3D World Magazine.
Best Paper Award at the 18th Annual Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation Conference (BRIMS 2009)
Steve Solomon, Milton Rosenberg, Matt Hays and Grace Chen won for their paper Evaluating a Framework for Representing Cultural Norms for Human Behavior Models.
Visionary Award for VFX at The ELAN Awards awarded to Paul Debevec.
2008
Jonathan Gratch elected President of the HUMAINE Association.
dL Maverick Award from the Army Training and Support Center (ATSC)
Richard Clark awarded for his work with the GEL training design system.
Honorary Classroom named for Paul Debevec at Montreal’s National Animation and Design Centre.
Best Training Category Winner at the Army Modeling and Simulation Awards
ICT’s Bi-lateral Negotiation (BiLAT) Simulation and Distribution Management Cognitive Trainer (DMCT)
Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2008)
H. Chad Lane, Matt Hays, Mark Core, Dave Gomboc, Eric Forbell, Daniel Auerbach and Milton Rosenberg won for their paper Coaching Intercultural Communication in a Serious Game.
Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2008)
Louis-Philippe Morency, Iwan de Kok and Jonathan Gratch won for their paper Context-based Recognition during Human Interactions: Auto Feature Selection and Encoding Dictionary.
Best Paper Award at the Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2008)
Louis-Philippe Morency, Iwan de Kok, and Jonathan Gratch won for their paper Predicting Listener Backchannels: A Probilistic Multimodal Approach.
Best Paper Award at the 8th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition
Louis-Philippe Morency, Jacob Whitehill and Javier Movellan won for their paper Generalized adaptive view-based appearance model: Integrated framework for monocular head pose estimation.
Best Medical Application at the 10th Virtual Reality International Conference (VRIC’2008)
ICT’s virtual reality exposure therapy treatment for PTSD
2007
Alain Fournier Ph.D. Thesis Award
Abhijeet Ghosh’s thesis, Realistic Materials and Illumination Environments, awarded as the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university.
Best in Show for Emerging Technologies at SIGGRAPH 2007
Graphics Lab’s 3D display awarded at the 24th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
Best Paper Award at I/ITSEC 2007
Patrick Kenny, Arno Hartholt, Jonathan Gratch, Bill Swartout, David Traum, Diane Piepol and Stacy Marsella won for their paper Building Interactive Virtual Humans for Training Environments.
2006
Best Training Category Winner at the DoD Modeling and Simulation Awards
ICT’s Self-Directed Learning Interned Module: Every Soldier a Sensor Simulation (SLIM-ES3)
Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces
Louis-Philippe Morency, C. Mario Christoudias, Kate Saenko and Trevor Darrell won for their paper Co-Adaptation of Audio-Visual Speech and Gesture Classifiers
Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment
Mark O. Riedl and Andrew Stern won for their paper Believable Agents and Intelligent Story Adaptation for Interactive Storytelling.
Best Paper Award at the 25th Army Science Conference
Susan Robinson, Antonio Roque, Ashish Vaswani, and David Traum won for their paper Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System for Virtual Reality Call for Fire Training.
Best Short Technical Paper Award at the ACM Multimedia Conference
Andrew S. Gordon won for his paper Fourth Frame Forums: Interactive Comics for Collaborative Learning.
2005
Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces
Louis-Philippe Morency, Candace Sidner, Christopher Lee and Trevor Darrell won for their paper Contextual Recognition of Head Gestures.
2004
Best of AAMAS 2004
Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella’s paper, Evaluating a computational model of emotion, included in
the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, special issue on the Best of AAMAS 2004.
Lifetime Achievement Award at the Mundos Digitales Conference
Paul Debevec awarded for contributions to computer graphics.
Golden Camera Award at the US International Film and Video Festival
James Korris and David Hendrie won for their entry Nowhere to Hide.
Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
Hyeok-soo Kim and Jonathan Gratch won for their paper A Planner-Independent Collaborative Planning Assistant.
2003
Most Viewed Article in the History of Machine Translation Journal
Bonnie Dorr, Nizar Habash and David Traum’s article, Hybrid Natural Language Generation from Lexical Conceptual Structures
Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
David Traum, Jeff Rickel, Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella won for their paper Negotiation over tasks in hybrid human-agent teams for simulation-based training.
2002
2001
Best Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents
Bill Swartout, Randy Hill, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Jacki Morie, Jeff Rickel and Marcus Thiebaux won for their paper Toward the Holodeck: Integrating Graphics, Sound, Character and Story.
Outstanding Paper Award at the 10th Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation
Randy Hill, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Bill Swartout and David Traum won for their paper Virtual Humans in the Mission Rehearsal Exercise System.
