Abstract:
Contemporary research emphasizes emotion's functional role in how organisms sense events, relate them to internal needs, characterize appropriate responses and recruit the cognitive, physical and social resources needed to adaptively respond. Recognizing, modeling and exploiting such influences can have broad impact across a variety of scientific disciplines and applications. In this talk, I will summarize a decade of research, in collaboration with Stacy Marsella, to computationally model the cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotion. I will describe alternative motives for building such models and how these different motivations necessarily lead to different evaluation criteria and potentially different designs. I will focus on EMA, a computational model that simulates both cognitive and social emotional processes and can engage in meaningful social exchanges with human users. I will describe a series of empirical studies on the fidelity of these simulations and discuss their potential, both as practical tools to advance human-computer interaction, but also as methodological tools for the study of human social and cognitive behavior.

Biography:
Dr. Jonathan Gratch is an Associate Director for Virtual Humans Research at the University of Southern California's (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and co-director of USC's Computational Emotion Group. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Gratch's research focuses on virtual humans (artificially intelligent agents embodied in a human-like graphical body), and computational models of emotion. 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. A recent emphasis of this work is on social emotions, emphasizing the role of contingent nonverbal behavior in the co-construction of emotional trajectories between interaction partners. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. He belongs to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Society for Research on Emotion. He is the editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, on the editorial board of the journal Emotion Review and the President of the HUMAINE Association for Research on Emotions and Human-Machine Interaction. Dr. Gratch is the author of over 100 technical articles.