Biography:

William Swartout is Director of Technology for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies and a research associate professor of computer science at USC. He was formerly the Director of the Intelligent Systems Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from MIT and his bachelor's degree from Stanford University.

Dr. Swartout has been involved in the research and development of artificial intelligence systems for over 25 years. His particular research interests include intelligent agents, immersive virtual reality, knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition and natural language generation. Dr. Swartout is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has been elected to the Board of Councilors of the AAAI and is past chair of the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has served as program co-chair for national and international conferences on artificial intelligence, including the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90) and the Third International Conference on Principles of Knowledge and Reasoning (KR-92)