On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 from 1:30-4:30pm (PT) the Entertainment Technology Center at USC produced a Zoom-only webinar; Towards Virtual Beings – an ETC@USC Digital Town Square. The event addressed ‘creating a more emotive and relatable personality, and improving the image, sound, and body language of the virtual character.’

The videos of each speaker’s 25-minute presentation along with their biography is below this event agenda which lists the order of the speakers and the topics that they addressed:

 

Speaker Bios

 

Guy Gadney, Charisma Entertainment

Topics Guy Gadney will cover:

• How to create an emotive engine to power and manage digital characters
• A map of character and narrative design for relatable characters
• The importance of a cast of multiple virtual characters in immersive narratives

Bio: Guy Gadney runs Charisma Entertainment, which powers  NPCs and digital humans in games, metaverses and interactive narrative experiences using tailor-made Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, enabling writers, producers and directors to generate complex interactive stories in an AI-accelerated no-code interface.

Charisma.ai is being used by major game developers, publishers and Metaverse companies to power the future of sentient digital actors.

Guy’s background is in Emmy and BAFTA recognized interactive entertainment productions such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, before more recently diving into creative AI for studios such as NBCU, Warner Bros, Sky Studios, and the BBC with Charisma.ai. He recently co-wrote the Universal Character Model white paper with the ETC, as well as papers on Unconscious Bias in AI data sets, and the impact of AI on storytelling and creativity.

Lauren Kunze, Pandorabots

Topics Lauren Kunze will cover:

• An introduction to Kuki: the virtual being with 25M human fans built by the team whose earlier work inspired the movie HER
• What a day in the life interacting with virtual beings looks like in 2032
• The 5 components that go into creating a virtual being, and how you shape a virtual being’s personality
• The challenges of implementing a virtual being today, including understanding the mediums for engaging with a virtual being, and whether they should be photorealistic or abstract

Bio: Lauren Kunze is currently the CEO of Pandorabots, the world’s leading chatbot platform that powers conversational AI software for hundreds of thousands of developers and top global brands. Lauren is also co-founder of ICONIQ, a Pandorabots spinout working on a humanlike AI operating system for the Metaverse.  Lauren built her first chatbot at age 15 and is an expert on state-of-the-art hard AI problems like natural language understanding with respect to the larger AI ecosystem. Lauren has authored four novels published by HarperCollins, and holds degrees from Harvard in Literature and Language, and Neuroscience.

Mark Sagar, Soul Machines

Topic Mark Sagar will cover:

• The goal of BabyX – making a truly autonomous digital human/being
• Building a virtual being as a presence that learns by experiencing the world around it
• Creating the framework for cognitive development and then seeing how it evolves with sensory input and real world feedback

Bio: Mark Sagar and his team are bringing technology to life, pioneering the creation of autonomously animated virtual humans with virtual brains and nervous systems, capable of highly expressive face to face interaction and real-time learning and emotional response, to create the next generation of human interaction with artificial intelligence.

Mark has a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Auckland, and was a post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. He previously worked as the Special Projects Supervisor at Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks and developed technology for the digital characters in blockbusters such Avatar, King Kong, and Spiderman 2. His pioneering work in computer-generated faces was recognized with two consecutive Scientific and Engineering Oscars in 2010 and 2011.

Mark was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019, and named the 2022 New Zealand Innovator of the Year.

 

Raphaël Millière, Columbia University

Topics Raphaël Millière will cover:

• The recent paradigm shift in AI research towards the use of large pre-trained models across different domains
• The way in which these models enact a form of artificial mimicry
• The path to generalist AI that goes beyond mimicry

Bio: Raphaël Millière is the Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He previously completed his DPhil (PhD) in philosophy at the University of Oxford.

He is currently leading an effort to understand the philosophical implications of the recent progress of generative models in computer science. Generative modelling has made great progress in recent years, spurred by the use of deep neural networks as an alternative to traditional symbolic algorithms. State-of-the-art generative algorithms, including text generation and image generation models, show impressive performance on a wide range of tasks and benchmarks; yet experts are divided about whether this reflects a genuine understanding of language and visual concepts. He seeks to shed light on this issue by combining a technically-informed account of neural language models with a philosophical analysis of language and visual understanding. He is also more broadly interested in establishing fair and meaningful comparisons between humans and machines in various domains, and teasing out the implications of recent progress in deep learning for models of human cognition.

Recent articles by Dr. Millière;

Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit; The language algorithm GPT-3 continues our descent into a post-truth world

Moving Beyond Mimicry in Artificial Intelligence; What makes pre-trained AI models so impressive—and potentially harmful

 

Matthias Wittmann, Digital Domain

Topics Matthias Wittmann will cover:

• How to approach designing an AVH ?
• Body behavior  vs  cognitive intelligence
• How to deal with your AVH’s emotions ?
• How to capture the essence of a character for mapping onto an autonomous character
• Challenges of moving an AVH from its 2D screen into a 3D world (VR, AR, MR, Holograms, …)
• The deep questions: Would it be possible to capture and store personality?

Bio: Matthias Wittmann has worked as an innovator, animator and supervisor on groundbreaking digital humans for features, experiential and special projects at Digital Domain and elsewhere since 2004.  Matthias specializes in developing interactive virtual humans in real-time engines.   He is currently the VFX supervisor in Digital Domain’s Digital Human Group and New Media department where he worked to develop the studio’s interactive autonomous humans, Douglas and Zoey, running in Unreal Engine.  He also supervises projects involving interactive virtual humans and oversees facial capture and scanning for features, episodic and more.   Matthias has received a Visual Effects Society award for “Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture” for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a Grand Clio for “Virtual 2Pac – Coachella,” and a VES nomination for the character Thistlewit in “Maleficent.”