Institute for Creative Technologies

Associate Director for Social Simulation

Stacy Marsella is the Associate Director for Social Simulation at ICT. He earned his B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University with a focus on AI planning, human problem solving and cognitive science. He was at Bell Labs before joining the Information Sciences Institute and the Institute for Creative Technologies.

He has over 10 years of experience in collaborating on the design and implementation of a wide range of applications that use these technologies, including Carmen's Bright IDEAS interactive drama for teaching problem solving skills to mothers' of paediatric cancer patients, the MRE/SASO military training prototypes, the TLTS foreign language trainer and the ELECT cultural trainer. Dr. Marsella is the author of over 100 technical articles and has chaired numerous workshops and symposiums on multi-agent simulation, emotion, theory of mind and virtual humans.

Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, including the PsychSim multi-agent social analysis tool, the Influence audience analysis tool and the SmartBody virtual human body, as well as co-lead the research on EMA, a computational model of human emotion.

His core research interests include multi-agent simulation and the computational modelling of cognition. He also applies this research to a wide range of applications. His most recent work includes modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.