Dr. Jonathan Gratch (http://www.ict.usc.edu/~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 is on the editorial board of the
journal Emotion Review and the
President-Elect of the HUMAINE Association for Research on Emotions and
Human-Machine Interaction. He is sitting member of the organizing committee for
the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) and frequent
organizer of conferences and workshops on emotion and virtual humans. He
belongs to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the
International Society for Research on Emotion.
Dr. Gratch is the author of over 100 technical articles.