University of Southern California

Events & Seminars

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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March 30, 2006

Jeremy Bailenson: Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and
videoconferences. Similarly, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the nature of remote…

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March 17, 2006

Louis-Philippe Morency: Contextual Recognition of Head Gestures

Head pose and gesture offer several key conversational grounding cues and are used extensively inface-to-face interaction among people. In this talk, we investigate how dialog context from an embodied conversational agent (ECA) can improve visual…

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March 1, 2006

Erik T. Mueller: Commonsense Reasoning and the Event Calculus

Commonsense reasoning is fundamental to high-level cognition. The event calculus, which is based on first-order logic, is an effective method for commonsense reasoning. It supports multiple reasoning types, including default reasoning, projection, and explanation, and…

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February 15, 2006

Doug Lenat: Creativity vs. Common Sense

The pursuit of Artificial Intelligence—from robotics to natural language processing to automated learning—has been held back by the "brittleness bottleneck" caused by the need for common sense. This is no less true for the more…

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