Programmer Intern 0907
January 07, 2009
Project Name
Social Science and Cultural Representation (SSCR)
Project Description
The focus of the Culturally-Affected Behavior effort (CAB) of the Social Science and Cultural Representation project (SSCR) is to define a language for encoding cultural knowledge that can be used by an ethnographer to record a set of ethnographic data, such that it can affect the behavior of a human behavior model. Our language focuses on encoding cultural norms and mental models of biases and stereotypes. This language also provides a common representation of cultural knowledge that is separate from a virtual character’s domain or task knowledge representation. An application of such a language would be the ability to change a virtual character’s culture by “swapping in” the socio-cultural elements of a model. For example, we have a virtual character whose domain is that of a police captain. Our goal is to overlay the police captain domain with a specific socio-cultural model (e.g., Chinese) that encodes cultural norms and values of that culture, to create a complete virtual character: a Chinese police captain.
Job Description
The intern will work with the project leader on software development tasks for the CAB software. For example, one task that fits within the time and scope of the internship is developing and integrating the capability to display graphic representations of the model networks with the existing CAB project software.
Skill set:
• Strong Java programming skills, including Swing (GUI) development
• Familiarity with software development methodologies and configuration management software, e.g. SVN
• Familiarity with XML programming from Java
• Natural Language processing (especially semantics and dialogue) background is a plus.