George Mason University

C4I SEMINAR SERIES
Dr. Jan Allbeck of the Computer Science Department presents
“Populating Semantic Virtual Environments”

ABSTRACTThe capacity for knowledge representation within simulated environments is a growing field of research geared towards the inclusion of detailed descriptors within the environment through which to provide a virtual agent the knowledge necessary to afford decision-making and interaction. One such layer of representation is that concerning the natural-language, or semantic, depiction of the environment and the objects within it. However, even as technology grows more capable of representing such information-rich environments the process of authoring and injecting this knowledge has largely remained a manual effort. Not only is this effort arduous for the author in both time and energy expenditure required, but the process also lends itself to limiting the ontology of the simulation further constraining the extent to which such knowledge may be used. Here we offer an affordable method for semi-automating the generation and injection of semantic properties into a virtual environment for the purpose of producing more natural agent-object interaction.

BIODr. Jan Allbeck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, where she is also the faculty advisor for their undergraduate concentration in Computer Game Design and director of the Games and Intelligent Animation laboratory. She received her Ph.D. inComputer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. She has had the great opportunity to explore many aspects of computer graphics, but is most drawn to research at the crossroads of animation, artificial intelligence, and psychology in the simulation of virtual humans.

Date/Time
10/15/2014
11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Location
C4I Center ENGR 4705