Mathematics Colloquium

Our second Mathematics Colloquium of the year will be on Thursday, October 14, at 3:30 P.M. in MaGruder 1098.  H. Chad Lane, a Truman Alumni, will be speaking on Learning with Virtual Humans: Using simulated role players to teach and inspire. An abstract of the talk is given below.  Cookies and soft drinks will be provided.

Abstract

Virtual humans are embodied, artificially intelligent characters that bring with them new social dimensions to computing. One of their most popular roles is that of pedagogical agent, or teacher. In the last decade, they have expanded to become role players for helping acquire and develop social and intercultural skills. Virtual Humans now exist for training in a variety of interpersonal contexts, including clinical interviewing, intercultural business, and even healthy play in autistic children. What does it take to build a virtual human? How can we best use them to provide virtual experiences for learning? In this talk, I will present on overview of research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies to design and build virtual humans that seek to promote learning. This includes work to build virtual humans for interpersonal skills training and informal science education. I will discuss our collaboration with the Boston Museum of Science to build virtual guides who answer questions about computer science and technology (http://www.mos.org/interfaces; http://www.youtube.com/user/USCICT), and explore the underlying psychology of interacting with virtual humans, what it takes to build one, and summarize the results of a series of studies we have conducted that examine the efficacy of virtual humans for teaching. My talk will conclude with some thoughts on current limitations of virtual humans, how ongoing research is addressing those issues, and what the future may hold for virtual humans who want to help you learn.