The Institute for Creative Technologies is a federally funded research center set up three years ago at the University of Southern California to advance the state of the art in immersive training. Teaming researchers in artificial intelligence, graphics, animation and immersive audio with Hollywood writers, directors and special effect artists, the ICT brings a unique mix of high-technology and professional storytelling esthetic to the problem of creating compelling immersive environments. This afternoon tutorial will consist of a panel presentation by top ICT affiliated researchers to discuss this wide range of technologies and skills and how they relate to the design of virtual environments. The panel will be followed by a tour of the ICT facilities and demonstrations of several virtual training systems.

shared virtual environments under three different conditions: (1) voice only, (2) represented by avatars with blinking eyes and lip movements during speech, and (3) represented by avatars that additionally included head movements.Such studies provide valuable information on how people use various non-verbal cues during interaction, and can inform the design of virtual humans.We are grateful to the people who provided detailed reviews of all the papers submitted to this special issue and helped us select these five outstanding examples of research on autonomous virtual humans:

Computer tutors and intelligent software assistants have traditionally been thought of as different kinds of systems. However tutors and assistants share many properties. We have incorporated tutorial strategies into an intelligent assistant based on the COLLAGEN architecture. We are working on an agent, named Triton, which teaches and helps users with the graphical user interface of an air travel planning system. We found that the collaborative model underlying COLLAGEN is an excellent foundation for both an assistant and a tutor, and that both modes of interaction can be implemented in the same system with different parameter settings.

The issues and previous research in intelligent computer-aided instruction (ICAI) are surveyed, concentrating on the contribution of each effort to understanding the various components of ICAI systems. Comparisons are made between ICAI and CAI. Various learning scenarios are discussed including computer coaches, gaming environments, mixed initiative dialog, Socratic tutors, articulate experts, interactive simulation, and discovery learning. Various forms of knowledge representation are discussed along with relevant issues and examples. Several techniques for student modeling and diagnosis are presented, as are their respective advantages and disadvantages. Pedagogical knowledge, its role in ICAI and several examples are highlighted. The evolution of discourse-management techniques for ICAI is outlined. Techniques for the automatic generation of problems from a general base of domain knowledge are presented. The design of user interfaces for ICAI systems is briefly discussed.>