Integrated Virtual Humans for Embodied Cognition

Abstract:

Creating virtual humans requires many components that need to
interact with each other. However the division of responsibility between these
components is blurred.  The typical agent model of perceive, reason and act
still remains true, however what is required is a better understanding of the
connections and communications between the body the mind and the environment.
This talk will describe our on-going research in creating interactive virtual
humans that use speech recognition, natural language understanding and
generation, cognitive and emotional modeling and procedural non-verbal behavior
generation. Our virtual human technology has successfully been applied as
negotiators, virtual patients and question response agents.

Bio:

Mr. Patrick Kenny (kenny@ict.usc.edu) 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 and integrate the virtual human architecture with cognitive
and simulation architectures for the Virtual Human project at the Institute for
Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. 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. His research interests are in creating
realistic high fidelity virtual humans, personality for virtual humans and
applying virtual humans for the medical field. Mr. Kenny has a BS from The
University of Minnesota and an MS from The University of Michigan.