Events & Seminars
February 8, 2012
Bill Swartout Speaks about Virtual Humans and Learning at NSF Cyberlearning Research Summit
Learning with Virtual Humans
For over a decade, we have built virtual humans at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Our goal is to create computer-generated…
February 1, 2012
Skip Rizzo Participates in White House Discussion on Games for Health
Albert “Skip” Rizzo, associate director for medical virtual reality at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, took part in a White House roundtable discussion on innovations in games for health. The invitation-only event, organized by…
December 5, 2011
Jacquelyn Ford Morie Speaks about Avatars at UCSD Neural Engineering Seminar
Virtual worlds are bigger than you might think. Active users of these world number almost 2 billion worldwide. This talk will explore the once and future possibilities for connecting with our avatars, and why neuroscientists…
November 30, 2011
ICT’s Kevin Feeley and Eric Forbell Present SimCoach to Executive Education Consortium
Eric Forbell and Kevin Feeley presented SimCoach and the SimCoach Authoring Toolset as part of an event during the University Consortium For Executive Education Team Development Conference held at the USC Marshall School of Business. …
November 29, 2011
Louis-Philippe Morency Presents at ACM Multimedia
Face-to-face communication is a highly dynamic process where participants mutually exchange and interpret linguistic and gestural signals. Even when only one person speaks at the time, other participants exchange information continuously amongst themselves and with…
November 29, 2011
ICT Researchers Present Multiple Talks at I/ITSEC
Tuesday, 29 November
Motion, Models, and Mockups
Session Chair: Jennifer Arnold, Booz Allen Hamilton
Session Deputy: Aimee Norwood, Booz Allen Hamilton
Markerless Full Body Tracking: Depth-sensing Technology…
November 22, 2011
Paul Debevec Speaks on Computer Animiation in NYC
Paul Debevec, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as the associate director for graphics research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles, will delve into…
November 11, 2011
Jacquelyn Ford Morie Speaks on Virutal Worlds at 2011 Saban Symposium 2011
The Saban Symposium focused on the process of supporting the needs of youth and families as they make the transition from pediatric to adult-oriented health systems. Topics included health care reform, communication and use of…
November 3, 2011
Matt Hays Presents at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society
Learners intuitively understand that they must rely on long-term memory processes in order to recall information after an intervening distractor (e.g., Watkins & Watkins, 1974). Several researchers (e.g., Muter, 1980) have supposed that reducing the…
November 3, 2011
Thomas Parsons at the Third International Games Innovation Conference
While advances in military relevant simulations provide potential for increasing assessment of Soldier readiness to Return-to-Duty (e.g., following a blast injury), little has been done to develop these simulations into adaptive virtual environments (AVE) for…
October 28, 2011
Mark Bolas Gives Keynote Speech at International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
Mixed and augmented reality is crossing the chasm from research to widespread adoption. This requires us to think beyond registered planes of pixels in space, and confront the unregistered mess of users, culture, and application.…
October 9, 2011
Thomas Parsons Presents Two Papers at Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction
Although psychophysiological and affective computing approaches may increase facility for development of the next generation of human-computer systems, the data resulting from research studies in affective computing include large individual differences. As a result, it…
October 9, 2011
Celso De Melo Presents at Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2011
The paper presents a computational model for decision-making in a social dilemma that takes into account the other party’s emotion displays. The model is based on data collected in a series of recent studies where…
September 23, 2011
Mark Bolas Serves as Expert Games and Social Media Panelist at USC’s 2011 Body Computing Conference
Mark Bolas served on the Games, Social Media, Entertainment—New Roles in Medicine panel at the USC Body Computing Conference. The conference provides a forum for the world’s foremost scientific thinkers,…
September 23, 2011
Belinda Lange at HYPER Summer School in Salamanca, Spain
Dr. Belinda Lane presents “Virtual Reality: General overview and perspectives for neurorehabilitation.”
Visit the HYPER website
View the program.
September 21, 2011
Jacki Morie at 2011 Human Factors and Engineering Society Meeting in Las Vegas
Morie was an invited speaker on her work in bringing Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to the Virtual World to help veterans reduce stress.
THE APPLICATION OF SIMULATION TECHNOLOGY FOR TRAINING IN MILITARY…
September 16, 2011
Thomas Parsons Presents at Arizona Psychology Training Consortium in Pheonix
At the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, we have developed an adaptive virtual environment for assessment and rehabilitation of neurocognitive and affective functioning. This project brings together a team of researchers to…
September 15, 2011
Lixing Huang Attends and Presents ar the IVA Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland
Effective face-to-face conversations are highly interactive. Participants respond to each other, engaging in nonconscious behavioral mimicry and backchanneling feedback. Such behaviors produce a subjective sense of rapport and are correlated with effective communication, greater liking…
August 31, 2011
Belinda Lange Presents at the 33rd Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference
The use of the commercial video games as rehabilitation tools, such as the Nintendo WiiFitT, has recently gained much interest in the physical therapy arena. Motion tracking controllers such as the Nintendo Wiimote are not…
August 30, 2011
David DeVault Presents at Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy
We explore the potential for a responsive spoken dialogue system to use the real-time status of an incremental speech understanding model to guide its incremental decision-making about how to respond to a user utterance that…
August 29, 2011
Kallirroi Georgila Presents at Interspeech 2011 in Italy
We build dialogue system policies for negotiation, and in particular for argumentation. These dialogue policies are designed for negotiation against users of different cultural norms (individualists, collectivists, and altruists). In order to learn these policies…
August 7, 2011
Andrew Gordon at the 2011 AAAI Conference in San Francisco
The personal stories that people write in their Internet weblogs include a substantial amount of information about the causal relationships between everyday events. In this paper we describe our efforts to use millions of these…
July 28, 2011
Jon Gratch at ISRE 2011 in Kyoto
The last decade has seen the emergence of the field of Affective Computing: a new partnership between the computational and affective sciences. New tools often transform science, opening up new approaches and new questions. By…
July 22, 2011
Celso De Melo Presents at the Cognitive Science 2011 Conference in Boston
This paper explores whether and how facial displays of emotion can impact emergence of cooperation in a social dilemma. Three experiments are described where participants play the iterated prisoner’s dilemma with (computer) players that display…
July 12, 2011
Jacki Morie Presenting at the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
While virtual worlds have evolved to provide a good medium for social communication, they are very primitive in their social and affective communication design. The social communication methods within these worlds have progressed from early…
July 11, 2011
ICT Virtual and Mixed Reality at HCI International 2011
ICT’s Belinda Lange and Skip Rizzo with present their paper, Virtual and Mixed Reality.
June 30, 2011
Morteza Dehghani Presents at DARPA Narrative Networks
Sacred values are different from secular values in that they are often associated with violations of the cost-benefit logic of rational choice models. Understanding and modeling the impacts of sacred values on decision making is…
June 28, 2011
H. Chad Lane Presents at the 15th International Conference on AIED
In this talk I will review the basic principles of human learning and education through the lens of American popular media. This is an invited address to be delivered at the evening banquet address for…
June 27, 2011
ICT Presenters at the Virtual Rehabilitation Conference
One of the exciting new developments in the field of Virtual Rehabilitation involves the release of the new Xbox Kinect system by Microsoft. This revolutionary game platform uses an infrared “depth-sensing” camera (produced by an…
June 27, 2011
Bill Swartout Gives Keynote Talk at the 6th International Conference on Knowledge Capture
Stories are a fundamental means through which we learn and share experiences. At the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, stories are the backbone behind a wide variety of simulated experiences that we create to educate…
June 21, 2011
Derya Ozkan at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
In many computational linguistic scenarios, training labels are subjectives making it necessary to acquire the opinions of multiple annotators/experts, which is referred to as “wisdom of crowds.” In this paper, we propose a new approach…
June 20, 2011
Fabrizio Morbini Presents at SIGdial
Individual utterances often serve multiple communicative purposes in dialogue. We present a data-driven approach for identification of multiple dialogue acts in single utterances in the context of dialogue systems with limited training data. Our approach…
June 20, 2011
Sin-hwa Kang Presents at 2011 Cybertherapy Conference
In this paper, we describe our findings from research designed to explore the effect of self-disclosure between virtual human counselors (interviewers) and human users (interviewees) on users’ social responses in counseling sessions. To investigate this…
June 18, 2011
Ron Artstein Presents at SIGdial in Portland
Error-return plots show the rate of error (misunderstanding) against the rate of non-return (non-understanding) for Natural Language Processing systems. They are a useful visual tool for judging system performance when other measures such as recall/precision…
June 17, 2011
Sudeep Gandhe, Alysa Taylor, Jillian Gerten and David Traum Present at SIGdial 2011 in Portland
We demonstrate a dialogue system and the accompanying authoring tools that are designed to allow authors with little or no experience in building dialogue systems to rapidly build advanced question-answering characters. To date seven such…
June 17, 2011
Kallirroi Georgila at SIGdial 2011
We present a novel annotation scheme for cross-cultural argumentation and persuasion dialogues. This scheme is an adaptation of existing coding schemes on negotiation, following a review of literature on cross-cultural differences in negotiation styles. The…
May 31, 2011
Kip Haynes Presents at IEEE Eurovis 2011 in Norway
As virtual worlds have become more popular for education and socialization, many researchers have begun to utilize virtual worlds like Second Life as a novel method for viewing scientific data [Bor08]. However, the typical means…
May 18, 2011
Belinda Lange in Boston to Present at the Games for Health Conference
Harness the Tech Behind the Kinect: Achievements and Challenges in the Implementation of the Microsoft Kinect Technology into Game-based Rehabilitation Applications
This presentation will describe initial user testing of game-based rehabilitation applications that…
May 4, 2011
Paul Rosenbloom Presents Poster at The 4th Conference on Artificial General Intel.
From Memory to Problem Solving: Mechanism Reuse in a Graphical Cognitive Architecture
This article describes the extension of a memory architecture that is implemented via graphical models to include core aspects of problem…
May 3, 2011
Celso De Melo Presents at AAMAS 2011 in Taipei
The Effect of Expression of Anger and Happiness in Computer Agents on Negotiations with Humans
There is now considerable evidence in social psychology, economics, and related disciplines that emotion plays an important role…
April 14, 2011
Carnegie Mellon Celebrates National Robotics Week With a Lecture by ICT’s Bill Swartout
What Have We Learned From Virtual Humans
For a little over a decade, we have been building virtual humans - computer-generated characters - at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. In this talk…
April 6, 2011
ICT’s Skip Rizzo in NYC at the UN and in New Orleans
Dr. Skip Rizzo will present in NYC at the UN to the World Health Organization on Trauma Intervention about aid worker preparation using virtual humans and about expanding access to care via SimCoach. The next…
March 24, 2011
Jon Gratch Gives the Keynote Speech at The 9th Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition
Face and gesture research has made enormous progress in recognizing human nonverbal signals, but still faces important challenges in understanding the social meaning and significance of such cues. In this talk I will discuss a…
March 21, 2011
ICT’s MxR Lab at IEEE Virtual Reality in Singapore
A Design for a Smartphone-Based Head Mounted Display
Thin computing clients, such as smartphones and tablets, have experienced recent growth in display resolutions and graphics processing power. In this poster, we show how…
March 21, 2011
ICT at the Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning
Andrew Gordon and Jerry Hobbs will present a paper titled “A Commonsense Theory of Mind-Body Interaction.” Learn more about the Tenth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning at commonsensereasoning.org/2011.
March 19, 2011
Evan Suma at IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 in Singapore
Leveraging Change Blindness for Redirection in Virtual Environments
We present change blindness redirection, a novel technique for allowing the user to walk through an immersive virtual environment that is considerably larger than the…
March 7, 2011
Julia Campbell at IEEE Aerospace Conference
The Immersive Naval Officer Training System (INOTS) is a blended learning environment that merges traditional classroom instruction with a mixed reality training setting. INOTS supports the instruction, practice and assessment of interpersonal communication skills. The…
March 3, 2011
ICT’s Skip Rizzo at the 2011 New Zealand Rehabilitation Association Biennial Conference
Clinical Virtual Reality: A Brief Review of the Future
This presentation will provide a brief overview of the many forms of Virtual Reality that have been applied across a diverse range of clinical…
February 23, 2011
Workshop on Human Agent Social Interaction in Open Online Virtual Worlds at ICT
A virtual world (VW) is a social virtual environment depicted by a rich graphical landscape, where visitors come together to interact. The inhabitants of a VW, are represented by graphical avatars, communicate using verbal and…
February 23, 2011
ICT Attending and Presenting at the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors
Josh Williams, Patrick Kenny and Tomer Mor-Barak will attend and present at the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors’ “The Nuts and Bolts of BSW Education: From Basics to Competency Assessment” Conference, Cincinnati, OH.…
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