Mei Si
Ph.D.
USC Department of Computer Science
USC Institute for Creative Technologies
| Email: | meisi@usc.edu |
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Mei Si
USC Department of Computer Science USC Institute for Creative Technologies
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I am a research associate at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) of USC. I am a member of the Computation Emotion Group lead by Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella. I received my Ph.D. at 2009 from the computer science department of USC. My advisor is Stacy Marsella. This July, I will be joining the Cognitive Science Department of RPI as a faculty member.
| Research Interests |
| Interactive Narratives / Serious Games | |
| Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) | |
| Computational Modeling of Emotions | |
| Multi-Agent Systems | |
| Human-Computer Interaction | |
| Computational Psychology | |
| Detect Emotions with Physiological Signals | |
| Machine Learning |
| Thesis Research: |
Thespian: A Decision-Theoretic Framework for Authoring Interactive Narratives |
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Interactive narrative allows people to participate actively in a dynamically unfolding story, by playing a character or by exerting directorial control. The support of user interactivity allows the designer to tailor the experience for different users, which makes interactive narratives particularly suitable for creating user-centered pedagogical and entertainment effects. On the other hand, the support of user interactivity brings tremendous difficulty to the design process, because it results in a huge amount of paths through the story. One of my key contributions is a framework, Thespian, for authoring and simulating interactive narratives. I explored how agent-based techniques and a restricted form of machine learning could be exploited to address the design challenge. In Thespian, each character in the story is modeled as a decision-theoretic goal-based agent, and a director agent is used for coordinating the agents for reaching plot design goals.. Thespian provides automated means for configuring and testing virtual characters, and thus supports fast development of interactive narratives in the face of open-ended user interaction. Thespian has been successfully used to build more than thirty interactive narratives in different domains. Here is a blog I wrote recently for introducing Thespian at an Interactive Story Telling workshop: http://redcap.interactive-storytelling.de/authoring-tools/thespian/ . |
| Projects: |
Virtual Sex: Real Risk Reduction for MSM
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This is a
NIMH funded project for AIDS prevention. In this project, tools are
being developed for naïve and non-technical authors to use Thespian
and the Unity game engine for designing interactive narratives. The
final system is estimated to be used by more than two thousands users
in clinical trials. |
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A twisted Little Red Riding Hood story is molded for
evaluating various components in Thespian. The user assumes the role
of the wolf.
"Everybody knows the story of the Little Red Riding Hood, or at least they think they do. It is about how a sweet little girl encountered an old murderous wolf on a nice Sunday morning when she went to her granny's house to bring the old lady some wine and cake. Today, I present to you a different story. A story that is told by the wolf, or one of its decedents since the wolf should have already been dead for many years..." |
The Tactical Language Training Project
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The objective of this project is to develop tools to support individualized language learning, and apply them to the acquisition of tactical languages: subsets of linguistic, gestural, and cultural knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish specific missions. |
Modeling Belief and Attitude Change in a Coherence-Network
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The focus of this research is to model how social groups form and modify their opinion. The basic idea behind the system is that people tend to form mental coherence when they make decisions and/or interpret things happening around them. This system is built as an extension of Thagard's theory on explanational coherence (ECHO). |
RAP Teams: Heterogeneous Robot-Agent-Person Teams
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The goal of this research is to provide an infrastructure to support effective coordination of robots, agents and people (RAPs). RAP team combines each team member's unique capabilities and promises to improve safety, efficiency and reliability in their tasks. On the other hand, their heterogeneity imposes challenges on coordination, because each team member has different social abilities and ability to coordinate with others. |
| Educational Background |
| Ph.D. | University of Southern California (Computer Science, Winter 2009) | ||
| M.S. | University of Arizona (Computer Science, Winter 2001) | ||
| M.A. | University of Cincinnati (Experimental Psychology, Winter 2000) | ||
| B.S. | Peking University, P. R. China (General Psychology, Spring 1998) |