| PRESENTERS: |
Mr. Sudeep Gandhe (http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gandhe/) is a PhD student at the University of Southern California in the Computer Science department. He currently works a the Insitute for Creative Technologies under the guidance of Dr. David Traum. He completed his B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, India. Dr. Panayiotis G. Georgiou received his B.A. and M.Eng degrees with Honors from Cambridge University (Pembroke College), U.K. in 1996. He received his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Southern California in 1998 and 2002 respectively. During the period 1992-96 he was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship from Cambridge-Commonwealth Trust. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab, first as a Research Associate and currently as a Research Assistant Professor. His interests span the fields of Human Social and Cognitive Signal Processing. He has worked on and published over 30 papers in the fields of statistical signal processing, alpha stable distributions, speech and multimodal signal processing and interfaces, speech translation, language modeling, immersive sound processing, sound source localization, and speaker identification. His current focus is on multimodal cognitive environments and speech-to-speech translation. Dr. Jonathan Gratch (http://www.ict.usc.edu/~gratch) is the Associate Director for Virtual Humans Research at ICT and a research associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign in 1995 with a focus on machine learning, planning and cognitive science. His research addresses the creation of virtual humans (artificially intelligent agents embodied in a human-like graphical body) and cognitive modeling. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision making and physical behavior. He has worked on a number of applications of virtual agents, including considerable experience in the research and development of automated and semi-automated agents in training. Dr. Gratch is the Vice President of the HUMAINE Association for Emotion and Human-Computer Interaction, Associate Editor of the journal Emotion Review, and the author of over 100 technical articles. Dr. Eduard Hovy (http://www.isi.edu/~hovy) heads the Natural Language Group at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC/ISI), and is a research associate professor of the Computer Science Departments of USC and of the University of Waterloo in Canada. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987. His research focuses on automated text summarization, machine translation, automated question answering, text planning and generation, and the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and terminology banks. He is the author or co-editor of five books and over 130 technical articles. Dr. Hovy leads a team developing the NL input and output capabilities for the Mission Rehearsal Exercise, the major training system being developed for the U.S. Army by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. In addition, Dr. Hovy’s research has focused on the design and construction of Webclopedia, a robust QA system that provides answers to factoid questions (in the 2000 TREC-9 QA competition, Webclopedia essentially tied for second place with three other systems). Dr. Hovy also leads an NSF-funded project in Digital Government, in which tens of thousands of data series from the Census Bureau, the Energy Information Administration, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics are integrated under a single large ontology and accessed via a single access planning mechanism. Recently, Dr. Hovy and Chin-Yew Lin developed the MuST information access, translation, and summarization system, which was used by PACOM for monitoring events in Indonesia in 1998–99. In current work, Dr. Hovy is directing students in the development of a large merged concept ontology, the taxonomization of the major approaches to MT evaluation, automatically extracting instantial information (famous people and places) from text and adding this to the ontology, and in automatically aligning the parse trees of questions and potential answer sentences using the EM algorithm. Dr. Hovy served as the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for 2001 and as president of the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT) for 2001–2003. He is past president of the Association of Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), and has served on the ACL Executive Board and on the editorial boards of the journals Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, and the Journal of the Society of Natural Language Processing of Japan. He has been program chair for the AMTA conferences in 1994 and 1996, program chair for the recent Digital Government Conference in 2001, conference chair for AMTA-98, served as area co-chair for NLP for IJCAI-2001, and has chaired or helped organize over 80 conferences and workshops since 1991. With Daniel Marcu and Jerry Hobbs, Dr. Hovy regularly co-teaches a course in the new Master’s Degree Program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Southern California, as well as occasional short courses on MT and other topics at universities and conferences. He has served on the Ph.D. and M.S. committees for students from USC, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Universities of Toronto, Pennsylvania, Karlsruhe, Stockholm, Waterloo, Nijmegen, Pretoria, and Ho Chi Minh City. Mr. Patrick Kenny (http://www.ict.usc.edu/~kenny) has over fifteen years of industry experience, working in the field of software development and artificial intelligence. He is currently the System Integration Scientist leading the effort to design the next generation architecture and integrate all the components together on the virtual human and SASO-ST virtual reality immersive and interactive environment. Before joining ICT, Mr. Kenny was a founder of SOAR Technology, helping to support and develop computer generated agents and artificial intelligence in simulation. He has successfully worked with game companies and used game technology on several government contracts, including developing a physical process modeler in a 3D virtual world for intelligence analysis problems and developing a prototype 3D environment to help analysts rapidly understand, visualize and display alternative scenario results to key decision makers. Mr. Kenny previously worked at the University of Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab, researching and developing robotics, mission planning and cognitive modeling for unmanned ground robotics vehicles, building soccer playing agents, and performing game studies. Mr. Kenny’s research interests are in creating highly realistic and interactive virtual worlds, virtual humans and robotics. Mr. Kenny has a B.S. from the University of Minnesota and an M.S. from the University of Michigan. Ms. Jina Lee (http://www.isi.edu/~jinal) received the B.S. degree in computer science from University of Washington, Seattle, in 2004, and the M.S. degree in computer science from University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, in 2006. She is currently a PhD student at USC. Her research interests include generation of nonverbal behaviors for virtual humans, machine learning, and computational models of emotions. Mr. Kim LeMasters (http://ict.usc.edu/people/515) is the Creative Director at ICT, overseeing the development of virtual training applications. Mr. LeMasters started in the television business in 1972 with ABC Television where he was Supervisor of Primetime Development. In a three-person department he oversaw the development of such series as Happy Days, Kung Fu and the Six Million Dollar Man. From ABC he went to Warner Bros. TV developing Wonder Woman and Harry O for ABC. He left Warner Bros. in 1976 and began a long tenure with CBS Television. Mr. LeMasters began his career with CBS as Director of Drama Development working for Richard Berger, the Vice President. During the next seven years Mr. LeMasters experienced a star rise with CBS culminating as EVP of Development and Current Programming. During his tenure CBS benefited from a long string of primetime hits, e.g. Dallas, Knots Landing, Trapper John, Dukes of Hazzard, The Incredible Hulk, Newhart, and Simon and Simon. Mr. LeMasters left CBS in 1983 to join Mr. Berger at the Walt Disney Studios as EVP of Worldwide Motion Pictures. Within a year Disney began a turnaround by releasing such hit films as Splash, The Secret of My Success, and the Journey of Natty Gann. But in 1985 Mr. LeMasters was asked to return to his faltering alma mater, CBS. As VP of Mini-Series, Mr. LeMasters developed huge rating hits like Sins and put what was to be a legendary mini-series, Lonesome Dove, into development. Less than a year into his return Mr. LeMasters was named Vice President of Programming for the CBS Entertainment Division. In that year, 1986, Mr. LeMasters began the long task of retiring aging television series and rearing new ones. His first season as the head of programming yielded Wiseguy,Tour of Duty, Murphy Brown, Beauty and the Beast and Rescue 911. In 1987, Mr. LeMasters was named as President, CBS Entertainment Division. He held this position until 1990 when he left to form his own production company, LeMasters Productions. Working as a writer and producer Mr. LeMasters created a series of pilots and MOWs before collapsing his company and going to work for Stephen J. Cannell, as President of Stephen J. Cannell Productions. There he not only increased the television output from 83 hours yearly to over 145 but also continued creating and writing with series such as Hawkeye and Profit. He finished his career with Cannell by executive producing, writing and directing the USA cable hit, Silk Stalkings, for three seasons. Mr. LeMasters became Chairman and CEO of ReplayTV in September 1999 before resigning after selling the company to Sonic Blue. Since then Mr. LeMasters has reformed LeMasters Productions and resumed writing and directing most recently having written one of the premiering episodes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes for TNT which aired in July of 2006. Dr. Stacy Marsella (http://www.isi.edu/~marsella/) is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and heads the Social Interaction Group at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He has a Ph.D. from Rutgers University with a focus on AI and human problem solving. He is well known for his work in computational models of human cognition and emotion. He also has extensive experience in the design and construction of simulations of social interaction for a variety of research, education and analysis applications. This includes his work on virtual humans for immersive training environments such as ICT's MRE and SASO-ST systems and the DARPA-sponsored Tactical Language system. He leads several projects related to virtual humans, including SmartBody, a virtual human animation system, NVBG, a nonverbal behavior generation system and PsychSim, a model of social interaction based on theory-of-mind modeling as well as being co-developer of the EMA emotion model with Jon Gratch. He has also worked on psychotherapeutic applications of emotion models, including his work on Carmen’s Bright Ideas, a system that teaches coping strategies to parents of cancer patients. He plays a leadership role in organizing workshops on virtual humans, social intelligence and emotion modeling, has over 100 technical articles and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental And Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Andrew N. Marshall (http://www.isi.edu/~amarshal/) is the lead developer of the SmartBody open source implementation of the Behavior Markup Language (BML). He is also an active contributor to the BML specification committees. Mr. Marshall has been working with embodied conversational agents and pedagogical agents for over ten years, developing agents for the desktop, web, and immersive theater applications. He received his B.A. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California in 1999. His research interests include autonomous agents, human computer interaction, educational technologies, game design, and video game technologies. Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency is currently research scientist at USC Institute for Creative Technologies where he leads the Nonverbal Behaviors Understanding project. He received his Ph.D. from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006. His main research interest is visual feedback for multimodal interfaces, a multi-disciplinary research topic that overlays the fields of computer vision, human-computer interaction, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He received the award for best paper two consecutive years (ICMI 2005 and 2006) for his work on context-based recognition and multimodal adaptation. He developed Watson, a real-time library for visual feedback recognition, that became the de-facto standard for adding perception to embodied agent interfaces, has been downloaded by more than 100 researchers around the world, and was successfully used by MERL, USC, NTT, Media Lab and many other research groups. He was recently selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the “Ten to Watch” for the future of AI research.
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ORGANIZATION COMMITEE: |
Patrick Kenny Jonathan Gratch Lila Brooks Eric Reece
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