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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Summary Sentence: Foley Scholar Talk
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Foley Scholar 2014 -2015The James D. Foley GVU Center Endowment provides graduate fellowships of $5,000. The scholarship is awarded on a merit basis for overall brilliance and potential impact of student research. The scholarship is made possible through the generous contributions of donors committed to supporting the GVU community’s student scholars and their work.
The Foley Scholars were selected from a group of eight accomplished finalists, all showing tremendous potential and impact in shaping technology for a broad range of challenges in modern society.
Presenter :
Mason Bretan
Title:
Motion Planning for an Improvising Musical Robot
Abstract:
Proprioception is the sense of one's own body and the physical effort necessary to complete an action. Embodied cognition is a theory stating that the processes and functions comprising the human mind are influenced by a person’s physical body. These concepts are discussed in the context of robotic musicianship and a system that jointly optimizes for higher level musical parameters and physical constraints is described. The system demonstrates why bodies matter and how physical embodiment can influence a robot's perceptual and generative musical behaviors.
Bio:
Mason Bretan is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Technology and is part of Gil Weinberg's Robotic Musicianship group. His research focuses on human-robotic musical interaction, artificial intelligence, and music information retrieval. He designed the functionality for several projects including the marimba playing robot, Shimon, the robotic musical companion, Shimi, and the robotic drumming prosthesis for an amputee drummer. Bretan and his work have been featured in several news sources including the Washington Post, Mashable, and New Scientist.
Presenter:
Deana Brown
Title:
Rivrtran: Mediating Communication in Refugee Support Networks to Overcome Language Barriers
Abstract:
Every year up to 70,000 refugees arrive in the United States for resettlement (UNHCR). The first three months of a refugee’s arrival are the most critical as they will need to interact with well over 2 dozen individuals—doctors, case workers, teachers, mentors. These people are key to helping new refugees accomplish tasks that lead to self-sufficiency such as getting a social security number and driver’s license, enrolling their children in school, acquiring medical coverage, opening a bank account, getting a job and so on. Many refugees however, arrive with low levels of literacy, unable to speak English and often speaking a lesser known language or local dialect for which professional interpreters are harder to acquire. To this end we developed Rivrtran, a simple Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application meant to support the exchange of asynchronous voice and text messages between new refugees and members of their support network. Rivrtran uses volunteer interpreters to provide culturallysensitive translation support for the messages exchanged. In this talk I will discuss the design and development of Rivrtran and the most recent findings from the current deployment with new Burmese refugee families living in Atlanta and their American mentors.
Bio:
Deana Brown is a PhD Candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research spans Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing and Technologies and Emerging Markets. In 2014, Deana received numerous competitive awards for her work including the Intel PhD Fellowship, the Google Anita Borg Fellowship and the GVU Foley Scholarship. Deana has conducted research in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. She most recently interned at Google UK (London) where she worked on improving multiple language search in select emerging markets and prior to that on the Google+ team in Mountain View, California. Deana holds a Masters in Information Technology (HCI) from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Spanish (dual majors) from Lawrence University.
Presenter:
Alexander Zook
Title:
Improving and Formalizing Game Design through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Abstract:
Games are used for an ever-broadening array of purposes: educating, training, citizen science, and even data collection. Yet our ability to make games for these diverse purposes remains limited: game design and development practices are poorly understood and tools for making games are very limited. I will present research on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for supporting and automating game design and development practices. I will discuss this approach in the context of active learning to improve playtesting technologies, automated game generation, constraint solving for formal game mechanic modeling and generation, and general game playing for analyzing how design decisions shape the space of player behavior in a game. These tools enable new development practices while contributing formal, computational models of game design that lead to a future science of game design. Concluding the talk I will discuss the potential for this approach to enable new game designs and design practices through the next generation of intelligent game development technologies.
Bio:
Alex Zook is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing in the School of Interactive Computing. He researches technologies to improve game design and development and formally model game design through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Alex has been a recipient of Georgia Tech's Foley Scholarship, outstanding graduate research assistant award, and Presidential Fellowship, as well as the International Game Developers Association Game Developers Conference scholarship. Alex has published at diverse, high-impact venues including AAAI, CHI, the Foundations of Digital Games, and ACM Creativity & Cognition. He founded the Experimental AI in Games workshop and has co-chaired the Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop and Workshop on the Global Game Jam. His work has been recognized with licensing by the Army Research Labs and an exemplary paper at FDG 2014. Alex received his BA in biology with a specialization in neuroscience from the University of Chicago and has interned as a data scientist at Blizzard Entertainment and Bioware.
