Graduate Programs in the Life Sciences

Research Interests:

• critical technical practices
• technology and consumer culture
• human-computer interaction
• Artificial Intelligence
• interactive technology for environmental awareness
• cultural theory

Affective Rendering

"Current computer graphics systems are generally based on the premise that the job of the renderer is to give a photographic, objective representation of a 3-D model. The result is pictures which are breath-taking in their accuracy and realism, but also often cold and impersonal. Even non-photorealistic rendering, in which rendering is done in styles that mimic various ways of painting or drawing, is generally based on the concept that an objective situation (3-D model) must be accurately displayed; it is simply done in a painterly instead of photographic way.

Humans, on the other hand, do not just make drawings to illustrate an objective situation; certainly neither modern art nor children's drawings would be popular if the overarching criterion for judging drawing were physical accuracy! Human drawings themselves are a form of communication, through which we learn about the artist and his or her perspective on the situation portrayed. In contrast, 3-D renderers show the physical appearance of the objects in the model, but do not communicate any psychological or subjective perspective on them. The goal of the affective rendering project is to develop strategies for computer graphics which allow these psychological, subjective, emotional aspects to be communicated."

Avatar Interfaces

"As a consequence of my thesis research, which became more and more focused on the interrelationships between agents and the people who interact with them, I turned to the question of how people interact with, understand, and relate to their avatars, or autonomous agents which represent them on-line or in virtual environments. In my project on avatar interfaces, I analyzed the metaphors underlying current avatar technology and proposed new technology based on different metaphors...

One of the results of this project was my work on semi-autonomous avatars in the Traces system, a collaboration with Simon Penny, Jeffrey Smith, Andre Bernhard, and Jamie Schulte. In Traces, a person interacts in a CAVE immersive virtual environment with his or her own avatar representation, and potentially those of others in CAVEs connected over a network. The avatar starts out as a volume model of the user's body movements, which lingers in a 3-dimensional analog to stop-motion photography. It then gradually becomes more and more independent, spawning particles which over time develop their own behavior and interact with the user. Traces provides a rich framework in which to explore concepts of "semi-autonomous" avatars and their relationships to human users."

Action-Expression

"My thesis research involves rethinking autonomous agent architecture while taking seriously the idea that an agent is not simply a self-contained technology, but a form of communication between people. There are several important components:

• analysis of Artificial Intelligence and its relationships to industrialization and psychiatric institutionalization;
• development of Socially Situated AI, an approach to agent design that situates agents not only in their physical environment, but also their social and cultural surroundings;
• design of an agent architecture, the Expressivator, which allows agent designers to more effectively control how their agent concept is being communicated. Agents are made more comprehensible by structuring their behavior into narrative sequences. The Expressivator involves 3 major components:
  1. Behavior transitions, which connect behaviors into meaningful sequences
  2. Sign management, which allow agents to be constructed with reference to and to reason about how they are being interpreted by the user
  3. Meta-level controls, which provide the low-level hooks by which behaviors can coordinate their effect on the user;
• implementation of the Industrial Graveyard, a virtual environment illustrating the concepts of the thesis and testing its technical feasibility"