project team - ECIRCUS - EU Framework VI Project - Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction

Professor Ruth Aylett - Heriot-Watt University (UK)

Ruth is Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Maths and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University.
After a first degree in mathematical economics at the London School of Economics Ruth entered computing with ICL as a graduate trainee in 1976. After three years of technical support she moved to Sheffield University where she worked in the micro-computing laboratory and developed an interest in Artificial Intelligence. During five years as a lecturer at the Sheffield Hallam University she developed these interests with particular reference to cognitive modelling, natural language and intelligent interfaces.

In 1989 she took up a post at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in Edinburgh University where she specialised in knowledge acquisition and knowledge engineering methodologies, working in the South Bridge building destroyed by fire Dec 7th 2002. This was followed by two years as leader of the AI group at the National Advanced Robotics Research Centre on the University of Salford campus with special responsibility for task planning. The robotics work done there was continued by UK Robotics, more recently known as RTS Advanced Robotics

Moving to the then IT Institute in Salford University in 1992, she worked on co-operating robots with Dave Barnes, then at Salford and now at Aberwstwyth, linking a task planner to a behavioural robot architecture. In 1998 she moved to the newly set up Centre for Virtual Environments and located her research in the overlap between 3D interactive graphics and artificial intelligence, first as Senior Lecturer, and then, from 2000, as Professor of Intelligent Virtual Environments. She moved to Heriot-Watt University in 2004.
Contact: ruth@macs.hw.ac.uk

Michael Kriegel - Heriot-Watt University (UK)

Michael works as a research associate for the eCircus project at Heriot-Watt university. His main responsibilities are the design, development, documentation and integration of the eCircus software. His main research interests are interactive storytelling, emergent narratives, knowledge representation and machine learning. He started his academic carrer in 2001 at the Berufsakademie Berlin, where he studied computer science. Parallel to that he worked for several years at the Hahn-Meitner Institute Berlin, developing software for numerical simulation of solar cells. He got his degree (Dipl. Ing. (BA)) in 2004 and then moved on to do an MSc in Virtual Environments at the University of Salford. Besides working in the eCircus project Michael also pursues a PhD, in which he focuses on authoring tools for interactive storytelling. For more information visit his university website.
Contact: michael@macs.hw.ac.uk

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn - University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Kerstin Dautenhahn received the Ph.D. degree from the Biological Cybernetics Department of the University of Bielefeld, Germany in 1993. Currently she is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire, UK, where she coordinates the Adaptive Systems Research Group. She is editor in chief of the journal Interaction Studies - Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems (John Benjamins) and will host IEEE Ro-man 2006. Prof. Dautenhahn published more than 100 research articles in human-robot interaction, narrative and autobiographic agents, social robotics and artificial life.

Professor Chrystopher Nehaniv - University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Chrystopher L. Nehaniv received his BSc with Honors in 1987 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. He is presently Research Professor in Mathematical and Evolutionary Computer Sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include understanding the roles of time and information in Adaptive Systems. He is Associate Editor of the journals BioSystems and Interaction Studies.

Dr Wan Ching Ho - University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Wan Ching Ho (Steve) received his first BSc and PhD degrees from University of Hertfordshire in year 2002 and 2005 respectively. His PhD supervisors were Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn and Prof. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv. The title of his PhD thesis is Computational Memory Architectures for Autobiographic and Narrative Virtual Agents.

Steve is now working as a full-time postdoc research fellow in the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the same university. His research mainly focuses on developing control architectures for narrative and autobiographic virtual agents for an EU Framework 6 funded project eCircus (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction).

Steve’s research interests are interdisciplinary, including: applying theories from Cognitive Science and Psychology to computational agent control architectures, developing narrative and autobiographic agents for educational software and computer games. In leisure time, he likes to go hiking, playing basketball, taking photos and playing computer games.

Megan Davis - University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Megan Davis is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. She has an interest in many aspects of learning; she teaches at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, both computer science and non-computer science students, in both attending and e-learning modes.

She is a member of the Adaptive Systems research group within the university. She has a research interest in narrative, focusing on adaptive interactive computer systems designed to promote a greater understanding of narrative in children with autism. Children with autism are a special case as they have specific difficulties with narrative which impacts their social understanding and ability to deal with new and surprising events. The goal of the research is to enhance the daily lives of children with autism through an experience which they find unthreatening, rewarding, and enjoyable. The work involves the design and production of software together with longitudinal studies involving small numbers of children.

Sarah Woods- University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Sarah Woods is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research expertise lies in bullying and aggressive behaviour among children and adolescents. She previously coordinated the psychology aspects of the VICTEC project at the University of Hertfordshire. This project involved designing interactive dramas within a virtual environment focusing upon bullying and social education for primary school children. She has also worked as a psychologist on the European project Cogniron, which is exploring the use of robots as human companions in daily life. Prior to this, she worked at the Institute of Psychiatry, London (2000-2002) on an evaluation study involving psychiatric inpatient units, and at the University of Hertfordshire (1998-2000) on a large scale study concerning bullying behaviour. She has several publications related to these subjects.

Scott Watson - University of Hertfordshire(UK)

Scott is a research assistant based in the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. He trained as a psychologist, and has been award both an undergraduate psychology degree, and a postgraduate MSc in Research Methods for Psychology. Before joining the e-CIRCUS project he taught personality theory and research methodology to undergraduates at UH for 4 years. Throughout this, he also conducted research into the Threat Advantage.
His major contributions to e-CIRCUS will be the UK content specification of FearNot!2, aiding the design of a psychologically valid autobiographic memory for virtual agents, and coordinating the UK longitudinal evaluation of FearNot!2.
On a personal note Scott plays field hockey regularly for his local team, and enjoys indie/rock music and can often be found at a live gig tapping his foot in time with the beat.

Professor Elisabeth Andre- University of Augsburg (Germany)

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science at Augsburg University, Germany, Chair of the Laboratory for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications and Director of the Institute for Informatics. Prior to that, she worked as a principal researcher at DFKI GmbH where she has been leading various academic and industrial projects in the area of intelligent user interfaces. Her current research interests include affective computing, intelligent multimedia interfaces, conversational embodied agents and the integration of vision and natural language. Elisabeth André is the Chair of the ACL Special Interest Group on Multimedia Language Processing (SIGMEDIA).
Furthermore, she is on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence commmunications (AICOM), Cognitive Processing (International Quarterly of Cognitive Science), Universal Access to the Information Society (UAIS), Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS). She is also the Area Editor for Intelligent User Interfaces of the Electronic Transactions of Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), and a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics for the period 2002-2004.

Professor Ana Paiva - INESC-ID (Portugal)

Professor Ana Paiva is a research group leader at INESC-ID and a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon. She is well known in the area of Intelligent Agents, User Modelling and Artificial Intelligence Applied to Education. After her PhD in the UK (University of Lancaster), she worked in Germany (in GMD) and in France (CNRS-COAST team at the ENS of Lyon). In 1996 she returned to Portugal where she created a group on intelligent agents and synthetic characters. Her research is focused on the affective elements in the interactions between users and computers and in particular in the interaction with synthetic characters. Her areas of application range from education, entertainment computing to virtual storytelling. She served as a member of numerous international conferences and workshops. She has (co)authored over 80 publications in refereed journals, conferences and books. She co-ordinated the participation of INESC within several Portuguese and European projects, such as the Storyteller (Portuguese Science Foundation), IDEALS (funded under the Telematics program), NIMIS (an I3-ESE project), DiViLab, Safira, VICTEC and COLDEX (IST- 5th Framework), among others.

Marco Vala- INESC-ID (Portugal)

Marco Vala is a researcher at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group (GAIPS) of INESC-ID, and a teaching assistant of information systems and computer engineering at IST, Technical University of Lisbon. He received a diploma degree in information systems and computer engineering in 2000, and an MSc in intelligent systems and multimedia in 2003, both from IST, Technical University of Lisbon. He participated in the EU-funded projects SAFIRA, ELVIS and VICTEC. Currently, he is working on his PhD thesis and his research focuses on embodied characters, human-character interaction, and intelligent bodily behaviour. Contact him at marco.vala@tagus.ist.utl.pt.

Joao Dias- INESC-ID (Portugal)

João Dias has an MSc in information systems and computer engineering (specialization in intelligent systems and multimedia) from IST, Technical University of Lisbon.
Currently he is working on his PhD, and he is a researcher at the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group (GAIPS) of INESC-ID. He participated in the EU-funded project VICTEC where he addressed and developed emotional agent systems (based in psychological emotion theories).
Contact him at joao.assis@tagus.ist.utl.pt.

Luis Oliveira - INESC-ID (Portugal)

Dr Lynne Hall - University of Sunderland (UK)

Dr Lynne Hall is a Principal Lecturer in Interactive Digital Media at the University of Sunderland. She gained her doctoral degree in 1993 at UMIST, UK and then worked in banking before becoming a lecturer. Her main research interests are affective interaction and synthetic characters and empathic engagement. She has over 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Lynne.hall@sunderland.ac.uk

Marc Hall - University of Sunderland (UK)

After completing an Undergraduate Degree in Interactive Entertainment Systems I applied for a temporary job as a 3D modeller at the University’s Automotive Manufacture Advanced Practice (AMAP)Simulation Lab. Those in charge liked my work and extended my contract while is studied for a Masters Degree in Information Technology Management. While working for Sunderland University I have involved with producing digital media for both standard display medium and non-standard displays, like our hemispherical dome. My work has been a combination of graphics for realtime applications and graphics for non-realtime movies and presentation.

My role in eCircus is to help produce the graphics for Fearnot! and Orient, this includes the appearance of everything that makes up the environment, possibly including certain aspects of the lighting and all of the possible animations that any character or object can perform.

Paola Rizzo - Interagens (Italy)

Dr. Paola Rizzo, PhD, is founder and partner of Interagens s.r.l. She earned a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Turin, Italy, and a MSc in Psychology at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" (Italy). She has been awarded two prizes from the Consorzio Roma Ricerche and the Faculty of Psychology of Univ. “La Sapienza”. Dr. Rizzo has been researcher for about 15 years at the Nettuno University Consortium in Rome, the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", and the Institute of Psychology of the Italian National Research Council. She has also visited for 9 months the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USA), and for 8 months the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (USA). Dr. Rizzo’s research interests concern Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, and Cognitive Science: she has carried out several research projects on pedagogical agents, lifelike computer characters, and multi-agent systems. She has published about 45 papers in international journals, conferences and workshops, has been in the program committee of two international workshops, and has been reviewer for several international journals and conferences.

Dr Carsten Zoll - University Bamberg (Germany)

Carsten Zoll works as a research fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Psychology based at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg in Germany. Additionally, he does diagnostics and psychotherapy at a medical office for child psychiatry nearby Bamberg.
He reached his diploma in psychology in 2000. After that he worked 2 years as a research assistant at the Chair for Economic, Organizational and Social Psychology at the University of Chemnitz. From 2002 to 2005 Carsten took part in the eCircus predecessor VICTEC. At the beginning of 2006 he reached his Ph.D. in psychology for research on decision making among experts of the financial markets.
His research interest include decision making, behavioral finance, psychotherapy, empathy and cognitive and emotional modeling.

Sibylle Enz - University Bamberg (Germany)

Sibylle Enz is research fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Psychology at the Bamberg University. Recently, she has worked for the VICTEC project (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters: www.victec.net) and is currently working on her PhD. Her scientific interests centre on empathy, problem-solving in social contexts, self-presentation and evaluation.

Malcolm Pademore - Education Consultant (UK)

Malcolm works in the field of ICT as an education consultant. He has worked for nearly twenty years in this area, first as a curriculum development officer with Cheshire Education Authority and then with the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and the International Curriculum and Assessment Agency (ICAA). He has been involved in a number of national programmes including a review of the introduction of the English National Strategy for Information and Communications Technology (KS3)and a technical support survey. He has also inspected over three hundred schools in England and Wales in all three phases as an independent inspector and visited a further hundred or so to assess the quality of ICT teacher training courses.

He has considerable experience working as an educational consultant on a number of European Projects including VICTEC and ELVIS - two projects involved in developing the use of autonomous agents within virtual environments for the school curriculum. Currently as well as acting as an education consultant to the E-Circus project he is also developing software for the CrimCity project that aims to equip young Europeans with the tools to design out crime in their towns and cities. He has visited China several times and written a number of papers and studies comparing the Chinese Education system with european models. He has recently been appointed a visiting expert at the Zhejiang Institute for Teacher Training, the lead institute for teacher training in Zhejiang Province, China.

Dr Mathias Rehm - Augsburg University (Germany)

Dr. Matthias Rehm is a senior researcher at the Laboratory for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications, University of Augsburg, where he works on intuitive interfaces, affective computing, and social interaction with embodied characters. From 1998 to 2001, he was a member of the Graduate Program "Task-Oriented Communication" at Bielefeld University where he acted as representative of the scholarship holders. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 from Bielefeld University on a thesis on "Multimodal Concept Formation in Situated Agents" and his Diploma in Computer Science in 1998 from the same university with a thesis on "Incremental Parallel Generation of Natural Language".

Contact information: rehm@informatik.uni-augsburg.de
www.interactive-multimedia.de

Professor Harald Schaub- University Bamberg (Germany)

Harald Schaub is professor for psychology at the University of Bamberg and senior scientist at IABG, Ottobrunn in the „Human Factors Team“.
He studied psychology, biology and computer science. He is also a consultant for top-management trainings in aviation, space and defence industry. He worked as a professor for psychology at the University of Jena, Chemnitz and Erfurt. He runs international, scientific projects for the European Community, NATO, the German Ministry of Defence and the German Ministry of Technology and Research. The key aspects of his current work are mechanisms, strategies and failures of thinking, planning and decision-making in uncertain and high-risk situations of military, political and industrial leaders, of crisis management groups and emergency task forces, as well as modelling and simulation of cognitive agents; social groups / teams / crisis squads, organizations, and interagency relations.

Natalie Vaninni- University of Wuerzburg (Germany)

In the eCircus project, Natalie Vannini is a research fellow in the User Evaluation of Showcases group and a PhD student at the Institute of Educational Psychology at the University of Wuerzburg. She studied Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and the Humboldt-University of Berlin. During her studies she worked among others as student research assistant at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development. With her bachlore paper she explored the different research approachs of intergroup discriminaton. With her diploma thesis she designed a personnel recruitment guide in accordance with quality critia and standards for job-related proficiency assessments. Her intrest area centres on social learning and evaluation.

Thurid Vogt - University of Augsburg (Germany)

Thurid Vogt is a member of the group for Multimedia concepts and their applications at the University of Augsburg. She received a diploma in computer science from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 2002. Since 2003, she works on her PhD thesis on emotion recognition from speech. Prior to her engagement in e-Circus she was funded by the graduate program "Task-oriented communication", working at the Universities of Bielefeld and Augsburg.
Within e-Circus she will focus on childrens' speech recognition and synthesis as well as emotion detection.

Asad Nazir- Heriot-Watt University (UK)

Asad Nazir is a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh with the topic of research as culture and emotions in synthetic characters. He graduated from IIU Islamabad in 2004 and finished his MSc. Interactive Multimedia from Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh in 2005. Asad is a part of eCircus in administration and also in the cultural domain of research.

Dr Adrian Gordon - Heriot-Watt University (UK)

Dr Adrian Gordon is an experienced Analyst/Programmer with several years of experience in implementing multi-tier systems targeted at a range of mobile and desktop platforms. He has considerable exposure to many leading edge mobile and web/internet software technologies. He is also an experienced lecturer and researcher in IT, with over ten years experience in the HE sector.

He has developed a range of messaging/information browsing applications using mobile and internet/web based technologies, for SME clients involved in the travel, games/mobile content and advertising/PR sectors. He has been involved in innovative R&D in the fields of mobile technologies, and Artificial intelligence, including Expert Systems, symbolic and sub-symbolic machine learning, Intelligent Software Agents, and Intelligent Computer Aided Instruction.

Dr Isabel Transoco - INESC-ID (Portugal)

Isabel Trancoso received the Licenciado, Mestre, Doutor and Agregado degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, in 1979, 1984, 1987 and 2002, respectively.
She has been a lecturer at this University since 1979, having coordinated the EEC course for 6 years. She is currently a Full Professor, teaching speech processing courses. She is also a senior researcher at INESC ID Lisbon, having launched the speech processing group, now restructured as Spoken Language Systems Lab, in 1990. Her first research topic was medium-to-low bit rate speech coding. From October 1984 through June 1985, she worked on this topic at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Her current scope is much broader, encompassing many areas in speech recognition and synthesis, with a special emphasis on tools and resources for the Portuguese language. She was a member of the ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) Board (1993-1998), the IEEE Speech Technical Committee (since 1999) and the Permanent Council for the Organization of the International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing (since 1998). She was elected Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing (2003-2005), Member-at-Large of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors (2006-2008), and Vice-President of ISCA (2005-2009). She chaired the Organizing Committee of the Eurospeech'2005 Conference (INTERSPEECH'2005) that took place in September 2005, in Lisbon.

Professor Wolfgang Schneider - Wuerzburg University (Germany)

Professor Schneider is the Chairman of Psychology IV (Developmental and Educational Psychology) at Wuerzburg University, Vice President and President of the German Psychological Association and Vice President of the University of Würzburg.
His interests are Development of memory in children, Intelligence and school achievement, Children’s theory of mind and metacognition, Development of expertise and giftedness, Development of reading literacy, Social cognition and behavior Longitudinal Studies.

Karin Leichtenstern - University of Augsburg (Germany)

Currently, Karin Leichtenstern is working towards her PhD at the Laboratory for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications in Augsburg. In April 2006, she received her Diploma in Media Informatics at the University of Munich (Germany). The topic of Karin's diploma thesis concerned the "Mobile Interaction in Smart Environments". This thesis was conducted as a joint project of the University of Munich and the University of Essex (UK).
Karin is mainly interested in areas of non-verbal and tangible user interfaces for children. Moreover, she is interested in mobile, pervasive and ubiquitous computing. For e-circus, Karin is researching novel input devices which address children's needs.

Professor Dieter Wolke - University of Warwick (UK)

I am currently Professor of Psychology (Dept. of Psychology) and Professor of Developmental Psychopathology (Warwick Medical School) at the University of Warwick.

I was previously a visiting Professor of the University of Zurich, Institute of Psychology and of the University of Bristol in the Department of Community-based Medicine with ALSPAC. I also worked at University of London Institute of Education, the King's College School of Medicine, London and from 1985 as research fellow and then lecturer at the Institute of Child Health (Hospital for Sick Children), London. From 1990 I was Director of Psychology (Research) at the University of Munich Children's Hospital and between 1995 and 2002 appointed to a chair (Research Professor of Psychology) at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield (UK). From 2002, I was Chair in Lifepsan Psychology and Deputy Director of the ALSPAC Study at the University of Bristol. From 2004 – 2006, I worked as Scientific Director of the Jacobs Foundation in Zurich.

Maria Sapouna - University of Warwick (UK)

Maria Sapouna is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick. She received a Law Degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2002 and an MPhil in Criminology from Cambridge University in 2003. She has also participated in the EU-funded Daphne project (protecting women from the new crime of stalking) where she acted as a key expert for Greece. She is about to receive her PhD from Panteion University, Athens on school bullying among Greek students.
Contact: M.Sapouna@warwick.ac.uk

MeiYii Lim - Heriot Watt University (UK)

Mei Yii Lim pursued a BSc in Computer Science (major in Computer Science and Mathematics) from University of Campbell, North Carolina, USA and graduated in June 2002 with Summa Cum Laude. Later she received a MSc with distinction in Virtual Environments from University of Salford, UK in July 2004. In summer 2007, she completed a Ph.D. in Computing entitled Emotions, Behaviour and Belief Regulation in An Intelligent Guide with Attitude from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. Currently, she is a research associate for the EU FP6 project eCircus. Her research is focused on Emotional Models, Emotional Memories, Emotional Virtual Agents, Narrative and Mobile Technologies.

Stephanie Brosch - University Bamberg (Germany)

Stephanie Brosch works as research fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Psychology at the Bamberg University. She worked as student assistant for the VICTEC Project (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) and for the BIKS Project (Educational Processes, Development of Competences and Formation of Decision on Selection in Early and Primary Education). She wrote her thesis about “Plans and needs of clients diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” and in April 2008, she graduated in Psychology with the elective “Behavioural Modification”.

Created on 03/31/2006 02:16 PM by ecirweb
Updated on 05/21/2008 10:06 AM by ecirweb