Talk by Stacy Marsella: Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human Behavior (2023-03-29)

Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide range of 
artifacts. The synergy between psychology and the engineering of these 
artifacts is the subject of "Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human 
Behavior", a talk by Stacy Marsella of Northeastern University and the 
University of Glasgow. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Winter/Spring 
Lecture Series.

Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk via Zoom 
on Wednesday, 29 March at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2):

URL: 
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

You can add this event to your calendar: 
https://www.ofai.at/calendar/2023-03-29marsella.ics

Talk abstract: Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide 
range of artifacts. At a large scale, social simulations are being used, 
for example, to explore people’s response to a natural disaster. At a 
medium-scale, models of human decision-makers are being used to study 
social technical systems such as the pharmaceutical drug supply 
networks. At the individual scale, work on human-robot and human-agent 
interaction seeks to facilitate interaction by giving artificial agents 
models of their human partners. At the extreme of modeling individual 
human behavior, virtual replicas of humans are being crafted, facsimiles 
of people that can engage people in face-to-face interactions using the 
same verbal and nonverbal behavior people use. The designs of these 
various models heavily leverage psychological theories and data. 
Psychology and the social sciences, in turn, use these computational 
artifacts as means to formulate, test, and explore theories about human 
behavior. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of my group’s 
work in social simulation, social technical systems, HRI and virtual 
humans. Then I will exemplify the synergy between psychology and the 
engineering of these artifacts from the perspective of my group’s work 
on developing and applying computational models of emotion.

Speaker biography: Stacy Marsella is a professor at Northeastern 
University, USA, Khoury College of Computer Sciences with a joint 
appointment in psychology and at the University of Glasgow, UK, Centre 
for Social, Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience. Prior to joining 
Northeastern, he was a research professor in the Department of Computer 
Science at the University of Southern California and a research director 
at the Institute for Creative Technologies. Previously, he held 
positions at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and Bell Labs. 
Marsella’s multidisciplinary research is grounded in the computational 
modeling of human cognition, emotion, and social behavior, as well as 
the evaluation of those models. Beyond its relevance to understanding 
human behavior, the work has seen numerous applications, including 
health interventions, social skills training, and planning operations. 
His applied work includes frameworks for large-scale social simulations 
and a range of techniques and tools for creating virtual humans, 
facsimiles of people that can engage in face-to-face interactions.


-- 
Dr.-Ing. Tristan Miller, Research Scientist
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, 1010 Vienna, Austria | Tel: +43 1 5336112 12
https://logological.org/ | https://punderstanding.ofai.at/