Welcome to Zsófia Ruttkay                                                                     Agenda

RESEARCH	PUBLICATIONS	ACTIVITIES	IN THE MEDIA	FOR STUDENTS	CV
	Titles   Affiliation    Office       Telephone  Telefax     E-mail	Associate professor, PhD Human Media Interaction (HMI) Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente Zilverling (building 11) room 2033 00 31 053 489 2836 or 3740 00 31 053 489 3503 zsofi@cs.utwente.nl
About myself in a nutshell A Hungarian mathematician by education and with a PhD in computer science, I have been working on AI-related topics for over 20 years. In the past 10 years I have been doing research on Embodied Conversational Agents. I have been interested in modeling multimodal communication on a micro-level, concentrating on individual modalities (e.g. designing facial expressions and gestures), and on the macro-level, in order to generate consistent and believable ECAs (e.g. designing the usage and coordination of facial and hand gestures).  I am fascinated by the possibilities in exploiting the expressivity and aesthetic appeal of non-realistic embodiments and according communication style.  I am also working on novel applications in health-care and entertainment, where the ECA has strong reactive capabilities to traditional human and other inputs. This poses challenges for  real-time planning and synchronization of nonverbal signals to events in the (real or virtual) world, music or motion of an other (real or virtual) character.  In teaching I find that students learn most (and also have the most fun) by thinking - exploring problems, making and testing models themselves. Besides coaching several Master, Bref, CapitaSelecta and HMI student projects at HMI, I introduced the class Virtual Humans at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Pázmány Péter Catholic University and in Budapest, where I have been regular guest professor. I am the most proud of ... ...  GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents) launched in 2005. ... the Dagstuhl Seminar on Evaluating ECAs in 2004. ... the numerous use and reincarnations of our Emotion Disc since 2000. ... initiating the International Journal of Constraints in 1996. ... my article on fuzzy constraints with 109 citations in GoogleScholar. ... the Foundation Vierkant voor Wiskunde (something like "Fun in Maths"), which I launched in 1994 with Prof. Henk Barendregt, to adapt some of the Hungarian methods of maths education for Dutch teenagers.
Last updated: 4 October 2007