Projects

The Rensselaer Immersive Language Learning Environment (ILLE) is at the forefront of advanced research in cyber-enabled classrooms for language learning. The unprecedented nature of the ILLE allows for researchers to explore all of the possibilities of using artificial intelligence in the classroom.

This project, developing a specialized virtual-reality (VR) system, introduces a new concept for an immersive virtual environment which is optimized for collaborative group activities.

HUMAINE is a platform that supports multilateral negotiations among humans and agents in an immersive environment, in which the agents are represented by avatars that can see and hear human negotiators, and speak to them in a synthesized voice.

CISL is designing a multi modal, multi-user, collaborative decision aid for intelligence analysis. The problem we're addressing is that of all the intelligence analysis tools that have been developed, few have been reliably adopted long term. Our solution is to develop software that supports how intelligence analysts are trained to find, process, and analyze information.

This Situations Room Infrastructure (SRI) is the core of the technical innovations developed for cognitive and immersive rooms. This infrastructure enables multimodal group-computers dialog, learning and understanding of group activities, reasoning, planning and facilitation of collaborative decision-making. The first use case enabled by the SRI is in the area of mergers and acquisitions. The technologies from the project have laid the foundation for all other CISL use cases.

Scientific exploration and discovery is the newest use case for the Situations Room Infrastructure. The room both learns from and works with experts to transform the decision-making process from an open-loop to a closed-loop with feedback from experts in the room.

Multimodal narrative generation and presentation technologies enable the Situations Room to communicate discovery and insights from the cognitive computers to groups of people. The generated narratives both automatically thread the information from graph data store (e.g. DBpedia) into a meaningful and engaging story, as well as draw on creative computation to make analogies between information points which would otherwise remain buried in the data. Those narratives are then presented to the audience through the immersive situations room using text, pictures, visualizations and data sonification techniques.