I worked at USC’s Institute for Creative Technology for 10 years. Early in my career I was focused on high performance computing, but later on I worked more with their virtual humans for learning. It was a great experience and most of the work was for the military. I got to spend quite a lot of time a various army and naval bases across the country and get to know many active duty officers and enlisted members of our armed forces. Here are a couple of systems that I worked directly on and helped deploy. For these projects, i wrote a visual animation markup system that allowed an artist to playback specific non-verbal behaviors (gestures, gazes, eye secedes) during a response. I also was involved in authoring the dialog systems and natural language classification.
I had the opportunity to work with some really talented people at ICT. Not only are they doing great graphics and animation research, but they are developing compelling simulations and models of human behavior and perception. Everything from conversational intent to contextual nonverbal behavior. Check them out!
This role playing simulation is still in use for training young Naval officers basic negotiation and leadership skills.
