Events & Seminars
November 5, 2008
Educating Learners to be Adaptive, Agile Thinkers
The military must produce leaders capable of operating within today’s rapidly changing environment, often with less time for schoolhouse instruction. For this reason, the Army is investigating strategies for efficiently educating adaptive, agile thinkers. This…
September 3, 2008
Envisioning With Weblogs
We present a vision of how the stories that people tell in Internet weblogs can be used directly for automated commonsense reasoning, specifically to support the core envisionment functions of event prediction, explanation, and imagination.…
September 3, 2008
Story Management Technologies for Organizational Learning
The stories told among members of an organization are an effective instrument for knowledge socialization, the sharing of experiences through social mechanisms. However, the utility of stories for organizational learning is limited due to the…
August 14, 2008
Toward the Holodeck: Integrating Graphics, AI, Entertainment and Learning
Using the Holodeck from Star Trek: Next Generation as our inspiration, researchers at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies have been pushing back the boundaries of the possible with the goal of creating immersive experiences…
August 10, 2008
Open House Tour of ICT Graphics Lab for PROCAMS Attendees
PROCAMS attendees are invited to tour the USC ICT graphics lab. The PROCAMS workshop series serves as an annual gathering place for researchers and practitioners who use, build, and design projector-camera systems for a wide…
July 13, 2008
Anthropomorphic Self-models for Metareasoning Agents
Representations of an AI agent’s mental states and processes are necessary to enable metareasoning, i.e. thinking about thinking. However, the formulation of suitable representations remains an outstanding AI research challenge, with no clear consensus on…
July 1, 2008
Electronic Theater Screening
Mundos Digitales is pleased to announce the screening of the entire 2007 Electronic Theatre. The show will be introduced by SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival Chair Paul Debevec and shows in full high definition. The…
June 2, 2008
Computational Models of Non-cooperative Dialogue
This talk will outline some cases of noncooperative communication behavior and computational dialogue mechanisms that can support these kinds of behavior, including generating, understanding, and deciding on strategies of when to engage in uncooperative behavios.…
May 28, 2008
Field Testing of an Interactive Question-Answering Character
We tested a life-size embodied question-answering character at a convention where he responded to questions from the audience. The character’s responses were then rated for coherence. The ratings, combined with speech transcripts, speech recognition results…
May 28, 2008
Anaphoric Annotation in the ARRAU Corpus
Arrau is a new corpus annotated for anaphoric relations, with information about agreement and explicit representation of multiple antecedents for ambiguous anaphoric expressions and discourse antecedents for expressions which refer to abstract entities such as…
May 28, 2008
A Common Ground for Virtual Humans: Using an Ontology in a Natural Language Oriented VH Architecture
When dealing with large, distributed systems that use state-of-the-art components, individual components are usually developed in parallel. As development continues, the decoupling invariably leads to a mismatch between how these components internally represent concepts and…
May 28, 2008
What Would You Ask a Conversational Agent? Observations of Human-Agent Dialogues in a Museum Setting
Embodied Conversational Agents have typically been constructed for use in limited domain applications, and tested in very specialized environments. Only in recent years have there been more cases of moving agents into wider public applications…
May 17, 2008
Productive Play: The Convergence of Play and Labor in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
The goal of this workshop is to explore the intersection between work and play in networked play environments. What sorts of labor-like efforts do players make in online games and virtual worlds? What is it…
May 15, 2008
ICT Workshop on Dialogue Research
May 6, 2008
Building an Interactive 360º Autostereoscopic Light Field 3D Display
This talk will present the hardware and software algorithms used to create USC ICT’s 3D display which is able to present interactive 3D graphics to multiple simultaneous viewers 360 degrees around the display. The display…
May 5, 2008
Demonstration: Interactive 360º Light Field Display
The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has designed an easily reproducible, low-cost 3D display system with a form factor that offers a number of advantages for displaying 3D objects in 3D. The…
May 5, 2008
Realistic Acquisition of Facial Geometry, Reflectance, and Motion
This talk presents recent work in USC ICT’s graphics laboratory for acquiring and rendering realistic models of human faces, bodies, and performances. It overviews traditional image-based relighting techniques for matching the lighting on an actor’s…
May 1, 2008
Morality, Anonymity, Learning, and Friendship in a Fractalized World
From online text games to YouTube, ethnographic insights have empirically challenged common sense assumptions about mediated interaction. These common sense notions include: 1) anonymity is the source of hostile interaction online; 2) children do not…
April 19, 2008
Creating Agents that Entertain
Game AI research is moving away from the creation of dominant computer
agents to the idea of creating agents that focus on entertainment. The
development of a realistic definition of entertainment,…
April 16, 2008
New Techniques for Acquiring, Rendering, and Displaying Human Performances
This talk presents recent work for acquiring, rendering, and displaying photoreal models of people, objects, and dynamic performances. It overviews image-based lighting techniques for photorealistic compositing and reflectance acquisition techniques which have been used to…
April 9, 2008
Rendering for an Interactive 360º Light Field Display
Computer graphics have transformed many aspects of life. But while a great deal of imagery is modeled and rendered in 3D, almost all of it is shown on a 2D display such as a computer…
April 8, 2008
Linguistics at ICT and Technologies that Use Linguistics
This talk focuses on natural language dialogue projects at ICT. It also discusses linguistic-related education, skills, and tasks required
to create successful voice interaction technologies.
March 31, 2008
StoryUpgrade: Finding Stories in Internet Weblogs
The phenomenal rise of Internet weblogging has created
new opportunities for people to tell personal stories of their
life experience, and the potential to share these stories with
those…
March 26, 2008
Supporting Musical Creativity with Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing
Music and language are two human activities that fit well
with a traditional notion of creativity and are particularly
suited to computational exploration. In this paper we will
argue…
March 15, 2008
The Arrau Corpus of Anaphoric Relations
The Arrau corpus of anaphoric relations was created at the University of Essex between
2004 and 2007. It introduces an annotation scheme specifically targeted at marking two
phenomena which had been…
March 14, 2008
Identity: Performing the Self in the Digital Domain
This workshop will introduce participants to the many types of roles that people play within digital arenas such as social networks and online virtual worlds. Erving Goffman, noted sociologist, maintained that we play many roles…
February 15, 2008
Computational Approaches to the Analysis of Textual Stories
Narratives of real-world experiences (stories) are an effective vehicle for sharing information about events, but also tell us about the expectations of storytellers that were challenged by their experiences. Story-based learning environments and training simulations…
January 13, 2008
Workshop on Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented Interfaces
When interacting with user interfaces, users have to bridge the gap between their goals expressed in mental terms and the interface’s structures and functions expressed in physical terms. This gap has been characterized as the…
November 28, 2007
First person narrative story extraction and retrieval
Reid is a 3rd year computer science PhD student here at ICT, and will be giving a talk on the work he did as part of his masters thesis in Computational Linguistics. This talk will…
November 28, 2007
From a New Perspective
A microscope allows us to capture scenes that are quite different from those we experience in our daily lives. At the limit of the smallest objects that can be observed with visible light, different rules…
October 26, 2007
Research Workshop: Transactional Emotions
The Transactional Emotions Workshop brought together psychologists and technologists interested in “transactional emotions,” meaning those emotions that arise from an interaction between individuals. Discussion topics included theoretical constructs, empirical findings and technology that can assist…
October 12, 2007
Research Workshop: Theory of Mind
The Theory of Mind Workshop brought together researchers from several relevant disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neural science, linguistics and computer science to discuss a range of topics including alternative theories about how people model others,…
September 11, 2007
Engineering Case-Based Reasoning Systems in jCOLIBRI
CBR has been proposed as a knowledge light methodology for building knowledge-based systems where problem solving is accomplished by reusing past experiences instead of reasoning on declarative domain models. Knowledge acquisition effort is greatly alleviated,…
August 23, 2007
Learning a probabilistic model of event sequences from Internet weblog stories
Internet weblogs provide a huge source of stories that can be used as a large corpus to learn statistical regularities of narrative text. In this talk, I will describe an approach for building a statistical…
August 21, 2007
Multi-Agent Virtual Histories: Disaggregating International Relations
Concerns over the environment, terrorism, ethnic violence and state disintegration have placed greater emphasis on exploring the possible connections between
resource scarcity and inter-group violence. The wide range of divergent outcomes resulting from…
August 1, 2007
Evaluation of semantic corpus annotation
Semantically annotated corpora are intended to capture semantic relations among elements in a text, but it is not known how uniform human intuitions are about such semantic relations. I present a novel methodology for evaluating…
July 18, 2007
User Simulation for Dialogue Systems: Learning and Evaluation
This talk focuses on statistical methods for learning models of users interacting with a dialogue system. I will show how dialogue management strategies can be learned through the use of Markov Decision Processes and user…
July 16, 2007
Injecting self-explanation in the classroom: An in vivo experiment
It is widely accepted that active, cognitive processing during learning results in a robust representation of the target material. For example, self-explanation is an active, sense-making learning strategy that has consistently shown to be effective…
July 5, 2007
Towards Analytical and Computational Sensemaking
In asymmetric information environments, the deliberate military decision making processes (MDMP) with all their linearity assumptions are generally regarded as inadequate. Generating courses of action must be progressive and opportunistic. Thus, the classical analytical models…
May 21, 2007
Inter-Personal Social Conversation in Multimodal Human-Virtual Human Interaction
My primary area of research lies in understanding the impact of social conversational behaviors in human-virtual human interaction. Specifically, the goal of my work is to investigate what social or conversational tasks are best suited…
April 25, 2007
Realistic Material and Illumination Environments
Throughout its history, the field of computer graphics has been striving towards increased realism. This goal has traditionally been described by the notion of photorealism, and more recently and in many cases the more ambitious…
March 30, 2007
Detecting and Adapting to When Students Game the System
Students use interactive learning environments in a considerable
variety of ways. In this talk, I will present research on developing learning
environments that can automatically detect and adapt when a student…
March 27, 2007
nteractive Story Architecture for Training (ISAT)
The Interactive Story Architecture for Training (ISAT) is designed to create
an engaging and individualized training environment. ISAT combines
interactive drama and intelligent tutoring techniques to improve the
effectiveness…
February 9, 2007
Visual Feedback for Multimodal Interfaces
When people interact with each other, it is common to see indications of acknowledgment given with a simple head gesture or explicit turn-taking with eye gaze shifts. People use visual feedback-visual information transferred during interaction-to…
December 20, 2006
Neurobiology of the Mind
On Wednesday December 20th, Antonio and Hanna Damasio will be visiting the
ICT. Antonio Damasio will be giving a talk in the 6th floor amphitheater at
10am. The title and abstract…
October 6, 2006
Nigel G. Ward: Learning to Show You’re Listening: A Trainer for Back-Channeling in Arabic
Good listeners generally produce back-channel feedback, and do so in a
language-appropriate way. Second language learners often lack this
skill. We present a training sequence which enables learners to
…
September 28, 2006
B. Chandrasekaran: An Architecture for Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning
An Architecture for Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning B. Chandrasekaran Laboratory for AI Research The Ohio State University Columbus, OH Though AI and cognitive science almost exclusively focus on predicate-symbolic representation as the medium of the…
June 20, 2006
Vadim Bulitko: Real-time Learning and Search in Game-like Environments
The pursuit of moving targets in real-time environments such as computer games and robotics presents several challenges to situated agents.
A priori unknown state spaces and the need to interleave acting and planning…
April 27, 2006
James Fan: Interpreting Loosely Encoded Knowledge
Knowledge based systems are capable of answering questions that have elaborate contexts and require deep reasonings. Unlike information retrieval based question answering, knowledge based systems take in complex encodings from users and return the responses…
April 25, 2006
Fusun Yaman: Reasoning about Temporal Plans and Plans for Moving Objects
Temporal plans play an important role in many real world applications. In this talk I will present my work on generating temporal plans and reasoning about temporal plans. I will particularly focus on the moving…