University of Southern California Professor Stacy Marsella To Speak at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute March 30

“Utah” is a virtual human, an autonomous virtual character that is designed to act like a human being and interact with human beings in shared virtual environments.

Stacy Marsella, a University of Southern California professor and researcher in modeling human emotions, will speak at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Wednesday, March 30.

Marsella — the associate director of Social Simulation Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a research associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, and co-director of USC’s Computational Emotion Group — will discuss “Hot Blooded Virtual Humans: Making Emotional Automatons.”

The presentation will be held from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Auditorium, and is open to the community.

“In this talk, I will discuss the computational modeling of emotions and consider the use of such models in a particular application area, virtual humans,” Marsella said. “Virtual humans are autonomous virtual characters that are designed to act like humans and interact with them in shared virtual environments, much as humans interact face-to-face with other humans. The simulation of emotions has emerged as a central challenge of virtual human architectures, as researchers have sought to endow virtual characters with emotion-related capabilities to facilitate their social interaction with human users.”

At the Computational Emotion Group and the Institute for Creative Technology Social Simulation Lab, Marsella works on computational models of human behavior, including emotion, cognition, and social behavior. He also works on incorporating these models into virtual humans, autonomous humanlike characters that can interact with humans within virtual worlds. He has extensive experience in the design and construction of simulations of social interaction for a variety of research and educational applications.

Marsella provided an abstract of his discussion as an introduction to the subject:

A growing body of work in psychology and the neurosciences has documented the functional role of emotions in human behavior. This has led to a significant growth in research on computational models of human emotional processes, driven by several concerns. First, there is increasing demand to use computational methods to simulate, and study, human emotional and social processes. Second, findings on the role that emotions play in human behavior have motivated artificial intelligence and robotics research to explore whether modeling emotion processes can lead to more intelligent, flexible, and capable systems. Further, as research has revealed the deep role that emotion and its expression play in human social interaction, researchers have proposed that more effective human-computer interaction can be realized if the interaction is mediated both by a model of the user’s emotional state as well as by the expression of emotions.

Marsella earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Rutgers University in 1993. His research has been supported by NIMH, NSF, NCI, AFOSR, and RDECOM. He is a recipient of the 2010 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. He is a member of the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE) and is a fellow in the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Marsella has published more than 150 technical articles. Recent published work includes articles assessing the validity of a computational model of emotional coping, modeling appraisal in theory of mind reasoning, modeling self-deception, and modeling the cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotion. His work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals including the Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, the Proceedings of ACII, and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.         

Marsella’s appearance is part of the Vollmer Fries Lecture Series, sponsored by Rensselaer's Office of the Provost and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

The Vollmer Fries Lecture Series was established by Vollmer Fries, who graduated from Rensselaer in 1924 with a degree in electrical engineering. He led several manufacturing companies and served his country during World War II, serving as deputy chief of the War Production Board. In 1950, Fries became a member of the Rensselaer Board of Trustees.

Contact: Mary L. Martialay
Phone: (518) 276-2146
E-mail: martim12@rpi.edu