Virtual Humans

Virtual humans are autonomous virtual characters that can have meaningful interactions with human users. They can reason about the environment, understand and express emotion, and communicate using speech and gesture. I will discuss various application areas of virtual humans in education, health intervention and entertainment. I will then go on to discuss the design of virtual humans with specific focus on their expressive capabilities. His general research interest is in the computational modeling of cognition, emotion and social behavior, both as a basic research methodology in the study of human behavior as well as the use of these computational models in a range of gaming and analysis applications. His current research spans the interplay of emotion and cognition, modeling of the influence that beliefs about the mental processes of others have on social interaction and the role of nonverbal behavior in face-to-face interaction. He has extensive experience in the application of these models to the design of virtual humans, software entities that look human and can interact with humans in a virtual environment using spoken dialog. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and a member of the steering committee of the Intelligent Virtual Agents conference, as well as a member of the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE). Professor Marsella has published over 150 technical articles and received the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM/SIGART) 2010 Autonomous Agents Research Award, for research influencing the field of autonomous agents.