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Events for December 23, 2015

  • Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, Dec 23, 2015

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense - Elnaz Nouri

    Wed, Dec 23, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Title: Cultural Computational Agents

    PhD Candidate: Elnaz Nouri

    Time: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 10:30 AM PDT
    Place: SAL 213



    People's cultural background influences how they make decisions. Faced with the same set of choices in the same tasks, people from different cultures tend to make different decisions. Cultural variations in behavior play an influential role in how interpersonal interactions unfold. Therefore, computational agents designed for interacting with people in social interactions (such as virtual humans that are used for training and negotiation) need to be sensitive to culture in order to be effective. The majority of the existing computational decision making models do not account for the observed cultural variations in behavior. This thesis proposes how models of culture-specific decision making can be created using information about the values of people from a culture, and that thses models can be used to support the decision making of computational agents in simulating behavior of people from a specific culture. The Multi Attribute Relational Values model (called MARV) assumes that decisions are evaluated based on a set of social and relational considerations. Different approaches for developing the decision making models within the MARV framework based on the availability of different sources of information on the culture are explored and compared with one another. An online interactive web framework is implemented that allows inter-cultural and intra-cultural behavioral data among users and computational agents collection through crowdsourcing platforms. It is shown that the culture-sensitive decision making models enable the virtual agents to simulate, predict and appropriately respond to the behavior of people from different cultures.

    Committee:
    Prof. David Traum (chair)
    Prof. Paul Rosenbloom
    Prof. Morteza Dehghani
    Prof. Jerry Hobbs

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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