Bio

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 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.