Events at ICT
2016 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS)
Conference Website: 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling
This year, the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling will take place at ICT. It aslo features a collaboration with the ninth edition of Intelligent …
Art Exhibition at International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 2016
The Art Exhibition of International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 2016 is an annual juried showcase of new creative works that integrate digital technologies, interaction, …
International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2016
Conference Website: 16th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
IVA 2016 is the 16th congregation of an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main leading scientific forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating intelligent …
Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems
Conference Website: YRRSDS 2016
YRRSDS 2016 is an open forum for spoken dialog researchers to discuss their work and research interests. This is the 12th edition of the annual …
Conference on Special Interest Group On Discourse and Dialogue (SigDial) 2016
Conference Website: 17th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
The SIGdial venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Continuing …
ICT Distinguished Lecture Series: The synchronous massive online course (SMOC) and new model of online education
Speaker: James W. Pennebaker, Social Psychologist and the Centennial Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin
Host: Stefan Scherer, ICT
7th International ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2014 (MIG 2014)
Speaker: Hao Li, Evan Hirsch, Javier van der Pahlen, Erwin Coumans, James O'Brien, Paul Debevec
Host: ICT
Games have become a very important medium for education, therapy and entertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are …
Human Matters: Developing Technologies and Strategies with Meaningful Impact
Speaker: Randall W. Hill, Jr., Christian Madsbjerg, Gardiner Morse
Host: USC ICT, ReD Associates, Harvard Business Review
The USC Institute for Creative Technologies, ReD Associates, and Harvard Business Review invite you to a panel discussion about the power of a human-centered approach …
Uncertainty During Interpersonal Negotiations: Perceptual and Physiological RamificationsDuring Interpersonal Negotiations: Perceptual and Physiological Ramifications
Speaker: Peter Khooshabeh
Host: USC Center for Economic and Social Research
Emotion is important in motivated performance scenarios such as negotiations. But studying complex interpersonal tasks is difficult with existing behavioral science research methods because of …
Michael Naimark Talk: Cycloramas Re-Imagined
Speaker: Michael Naimark
Host: ICT Graphics Lab
“VR is back!”, and while for most this means head-mounted displays and fantasy imagery, collective displays and realworld imagery are untapped both as a new …
Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference Tours ICT
Speaker: Randall W. Hill, Jr. and Skip Rizzo and more
Host: Skip Rizzo and NextMed VR
On Friday evening, conference participants from the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference can enjoy a tour and reception at the University of Southern California’s Institute …
Mel Slater: “Immersive Virtual Reality: Changing the Self Not Just the Place”
Speaker: Mel Slater
Host: USC ICT Mixed Reality Lab
12:00 – 1:00PM | USC ICT Theater Abstract: Virtual reality has typically been used to induce an illusory transformation of location. Instead of being in, …
Cristina Conati: “Learner Modeling Beyond Problem Solving Activities”
Speaker: Cristina Conati
Abstract: The field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) has successfully delivered techniques and systems to provide student-adaptive support for problem solving in variety of domains. …
Film Screening and Q&A
WHAT: A screening and Q&A with the creators of Friends you Haven’t Met Yet, a documentary short film exploring issues of ethics and online privacy …
Ravi Ramamoorth: “Sampling and Reconstruction of High-Dimensional Visual Appearance”
Speaker: Ravi Ramamoorth
Abstract: Many problems in computer graphics and computer vision involve high-dimensional 3D-8D visual datasets. Real-time image synthesis with changing lighting and view is often accomplished …
ICT Hosts Visitors from NATO and ONR
Rene LaRose, director of the the NATO Science and Coordination Office, visited ICT along with John Tangney from the Office of Naval Research and Paul …
Professor Prashant Doshi: “Compressing Mental Model Spaces and Modeling Human”
Speaker: Prashant Doshi
Abstract: A wide swath of multidisciplinary areas in autonomous multiagent systems benefit from modeling interacting agents. However, the space of candidate mental models is generally …
Talk at ICT: Douglas Van Praet – The Cognitive Science of Effective Brand Narratives
Please join us next Thursday September 12 at 2pm in the large 2nd floor Amphitheater for a special talk by a luminary of the Los …
Expert Talk: Machine Learning and Character Animation
Speaker: Sergey Levine
Host: ICT Virtual Humans Group
Sergey Levine, a Ph.D. candidate from Stanford, speaks about character animation and machine learning. Applications include motion controllers, quasi-physics, path planning and gesturing.
Game Theory and Human Behavior Fall Symposium
Speaker: Several
Host: USC Game Theory and Human Behavior Group
Game Theory and Human Behavior addresses problems of global interest such as energy, healthcare, financial markets and security necessarily involve understanding and influencing the behavior …
Technology & Innovation for the Prevention & Treatment of PTSD Conference
Host: USC ICT
War is perhaps one of the most challenging situations that a human being can experience. The physical, emotional, cognitive and psychological demands of a combat …
Lunchtime Book Talk by Science Journalist and Author Matt Kaplan
Speaker: Matt Kaplan
Host: Randall W. Hill, Jr.
Tuesday, October 30 from 12:30-1:30 PM Introduction by Randy Hill Get into the Halloween spirit with a lunchtime book talk with science journalist and author …
Jacki Morie: “Using Virtual Worlds are an Adavnced Form of Telehealth Care”
Speaker: Jacki Morie
Jacki Morie will be reporting on how we are making advances in using Virtual Worlds as advanced telehealth care through the TOPSS-VW Project at ICT.
NCOA Leadership Workshop
Conference Website: NCOA Leadership Workshop
View the Workshop Agenda here.
Congkai Sun, Louis-Philippe Morency: “Towards Speaker Adaptation for Dialogue Act Recognition”
Speaker: Congkai Sun, Louis-Philippe Morency
Host: SEMDIAL 2011 workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue
Dialogue act labels are being used to represent a higher level intention of utterances during human conversation (Stolcke et al., 2000). Automatic dialogue act recognition …
Louis-Philippe Morency: “Towards Speaker Adaptation for Dialogue Act Recognition”
Speaker: Louis-Philippe Morency
Host: SEMDIAL 2011 workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue
In this work we study the effectiveness of speaker adaptation for Dialogue Act recognition in multiparty meetings. First, we analyze idiosyncracy in dialogue verbal acts …
ICT Workshop on Overlap in Human-Computer Dialogue
Conference Website: ICT Workshop on Overlap in Human-Computer Dialogue
Organizing Committee: David Traum, Jens Edlund, Nigel Ward Background Natural Human dialogue (especially multiparty dialogue) contains many instances of more than one person talking at …
Predictive Models of Human Communication Dynamics
Conference Website: Predictive Models of Human Commucation Dynamics
In the study of human face-to-face communication, the patterning of interlocutor actions and interactions, moment-by-moment, is a matter of great scientific interest; and predictive models …
INCOPD ALC2015 Immersive Training Workshop
Conference Website: INCOPD ALC2015 Immersive Training Workshop
The purpose of the immersive training program is to introduce Army trainers to engaging and relevant instructional technologies such as highly realistic, interactive games and …
Workshop on Human-Agent Social Interaction in Open Online Virtual Worlds
Conference Website: Workshop on Human-Agent Social Interaction in Open Online Virtual Worlds
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 …
Reasoning With Text
Conference Website: Reasoning with Text
Intelligent robots of the future are going to need to know a lot of stuff. They are going to need to know how a power …
Mark Core: “Natural Language Understanding Considerations for Lifelong Learning Companions”
Speaker: Mark Core
Host: Tenth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing
In this paper, we present considerations for natural language processing for a lifelong learning companion. In the context of these considerations, we review related work …
ICT Workshop: Predictive Models of Human Communication Dynamics Conference
In the study of human face-to-face communication, the patterning of interlocutor actions and interactions, moment-by-moment, is a matter of great scientific interest; and predictive models …
ICT FML Workshop
Conference Website: ICT FML Workshop
Examples of FML in use ICT Stefan Kopp Hannes Vilhjálmsson In this paper I reviewed the functions I have used in the past and am …
Astrid von der Putten, Nicole Kramer, Jonathan Gratch: “Who’s there? Can a Virtual Agent Really Elicit Social Presence”
Speaker: Astrid von der Putten, Nicole Kramer, Jonathan Gratch
Host: 12th Annual International Workshop on Presence
This study investigates whether humans perceive a higher degree of social presence when interacting with an animated character that displays natural as opposed to no …
Richard Clark, Daniel Schwartz: “Adaptability Research Workshop”
Speaker: Richard Clark, Daniel Schwartz
Host: USC ICT and USC CCT
The workshop agenda was designed to begin the process of overcoming the bias implicit in past learning and adaptability research and practice. Of the ten …
Jacki Morie, Jeff Worth: “StoryBox Workshop””
Speaker: Jackie Morie, Jeff Wirth
Host: USC ICT
The StoryBox Workshop was held at ICT’s McConnell Facility, with Jeff Wirth, designer of the StoryBox format, several interactors from Orlando and Los Angeles, and …
Jonathan Gratch: “Research Workshop: Virtual Human Toolkit”
Speaker: Jonathan Gratch
Host: USC ICT
The Institute for Creative Technologies is organizing a small, invitation-only “Virtual Human School”, intended for graduate students, junior researchers and Army personnel. It is designed …
David Traum: “Research Workshop: Multi-modal Grounding for Virtual Humans and Robots”
Speaker: David Traum
Host: USC ICT
Grounding is the process of adding to the “Common Ground” between interacting participants. There have been several approaches to these issues, including computational models of …
Open House Tour of ICT Graphics Lab for PROCAMS Attendees
Speaker: Paul Debevec
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 …
ICT Workshop on Dialogue Research
Speaker: David Traum, Kevin Feeley, Antonio Roque, Patrick Kenny, Arno Hartholt, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Dusan Jan, Sudeep Gandhe
Host: David Traum
Other presenters include David Devault – Rutgers, David Herrera – UTEP, Raquel Fernandez – Stanford, Robin Cooper, Staffan Larsson – Goteborg Univeristy
Patricia Lange, PhD: “Morality, Anonymity, Learning, and Friendship in a Fractalized World”
Speaker: Patricia Lange
Host: David Traum
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 …
Cyrus Wilson: “From a New Perspective”
Speaker: Cyrus Wilson
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 …
Reid Swanson: “First person narrative story extraction and retrieval”
Speaker: Reid Swanson
Host: Andrew Gordon
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 …
Jonathan Gratch: “Research Workshop: Transactional Emotions”
Speaker: Jonathan Gratch
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 …
Andrew Gordon and Stacy Marsella: “Research Workshop: Theory of Mind”
Speaker: Andrew Gordon and Stacy Marsella
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 …
Pedro A. Gonzalez Calero: “Engineering Case-Based Reasoning Systems in jCOLIBRI”
Speaker: Pedro A. Gonzalez Calero
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 …
Mehdi Manshadi: “Learning a probabilistic model of event sequences from Internet weblog stories”
Speaker: Mehdi Manshadi
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 …
Darold Higa: “Multi-Agent Virtual Histories: Disaggregating International Relations”
Speaker: Darold Higa
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. …
Ron Artstein: “Evaluation of semantic corpus annotation”
Speaker: Ron Artstein
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 …
Kallirroi Georgila: “User Simulation for Dialogue Systems: Learning and Evaluation”
Speaker: Kallirroi Georgila
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 …
Bob Hausmann: “Injecting self-explanation in the classroom: An in vivo experiment”
Speaker: Bob Hausmann
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, …
Celestine Ntuen: “Towards Analytical and Computational Sensemaking”
Speaker: Celestine Ntuen
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 …
Sabarish V. Babu: “Inter-Personal Social Conversation in Multimodal Human-Virtual Human Interaction”
Speaker: Sabarish V. Babu
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 …
Abhijeet Ghosh: “Realistic Material and Illumination Environments”
Speaker: Abhijeet Ghosh
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, …
Ryan Baker: “Detecting and Adapting to When Students Game the System”
Speaker: Ryan Baker
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 …
Lisa Holt and Brian Stensrud: “Interactive Story Architecture for Training (ISAT)”
Speaker: Lisa Holt and Brian Stensrud
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 …
Louis-Philippe Morency: “Visual Feedback for Multimodal Interfaces”
Speaker: Louis-Philippe Morency
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 …
Antonio Damasio: “Neurobiology of the Mind”
Speaker: Antonio Damasio
Host: USC ICT
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 …
Jonathan Gratch, Anna Okhmatovskaia, Francois Lamothe, Stacy Marsella, Mattheiu Morales, Jan van der Werf, Louis-Philippe Morency: “Virtual Rapport”
Speaker: Jonathan Gratch, Anna Okhmatovskaia, Francois Lamothe, Stacy Marsella, Mattheiu Morales, Jan van der Werf, Louis-Philippe Morency
Host: 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 06)
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 …
Stacy Marsella, Sharon Carnicke, Jonathan Gratch, Anna Okhmatovskaia, Skip Rizzo: “An exploration of Delsarte’s structural acting system”
Speaker: Stacy Marsella, Sharon Carnicke, Jonathan Gratch, Anna Okhmatovskaia, Skip Rizzo
Host: 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 06)
The designers of virtual agents often draw on a large research literature in psychology, linguistics and human ethology to design embodied agents that can interact …
Vadim Bulitko: “Real-time Learning and Search in Game-like Environments”
Speaker: Vadim Bulutko
Host: Michael van Lent
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 …
James Fan: “Interpreting Loosely Encoded Knowledge”
Speaker: James Fan
Host: Jonathan Gratch
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 …
Fusun Yaman: “Reasoning about Temporal Plans and Plans for Moving Objects”
Speaker: Fusun Yaman
Host: Jonathan Gratch
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 …
Jeremy Bailenson: “Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality”
Speaker: Jeremy Bailenson
Host: Jonathan Gratch
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) …
Louis-Philippe Morency: “Contextual Recognition of Head Gestures”
Speaker: Louis-Philippe Morency
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 …
Erik T. Mueller: “Commonsense Reasoning and the Event Calculus”
Speaker: Erik T. Mueller
Host: Andrew Gordon
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 …
Doug Lenat: “Creativity vs. Common Sense”
Speaker: Doug Lenat
Host: Lori Weiss
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 …