Bio

Jonathan Gratch (http://www.ict.usc.edu/~gratch) is Director for Virtual Human Research at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, a Research Full Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at USC and Director of USC’s Affective Computing Group. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995.  Dr. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ role in shaping human-computer interactions in virtual environments. In particular, 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. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing (retired), Associate Editor of Affective Science, and former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC). He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), AAAC and the Cognitive Science Society, a SIGART Autonomous Agent’s Award recipient, and a Senior Member of IEEE.