ICT and Viterbi Researchers Win Best Paper Award at IVA 2011

A paper written by Jason Tsai, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering received the Best Paper Award at the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents in Reykjavik, Iceland. The paper, Empirical Evaluation of Computational Emotional Contagion Models, was also authored by Stacy Marsella of ICT, Milind Tambe of the Viterbi School, and Emma Bowring of the University of the Pacific. The award-winning research compares the ability of two computer models to reproduce two real crowd panic scenes.  In the paper the authors explain, “the underlying mechanism of the spread of emotions has seen little quantification and application to computational agents despite extensive evidence of its impacts in everyday life.”