Institute for Creative Technologies

Director of Technology

William Swartout is Director of Technology for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and a research professor of computer science at USC. From 1989 to 1999 he was Director of the Intelligent Systems Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from MIT and his bachelor's degree from Stanford University.

Dr. Swartout has been involved in the research and development of AI systems for over 30 years. His particular research interests include virtual humans, explanation and text generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge sharing, education, intelligent agents and the development of new AI architectures. While at ISI, he started and led the Explainable Expert Systems project, which developed a new approach for creating knowledge-based systems that allowed such systems to explain and justify their reasoning to users in English. As division director, he was personally involved in numerous research efforts, most notable among them the EXPECT project, a knowledge acquisition framework designed to allow domain experts to modify a knowledge-based system, while freeing them from the need to understand the implementation.

As Director of Technology at the ICT, Dr. Swartout provides overall direction for the ICT's research programs. He personally led the Mission Rehearsal Exercise project, which created an immersive virtual reality environment in which trainees interact with computer generated virtual humans. This project received awards for outstanding innovation in modeling and simulation from the NTSA and has received other awards including first place for innovative application of agent technology at the 2001 International Conference on Autonomous Agents. He now leads the SASO-ST project, a successor to the Mission Rehearsal project, which is extending virtual human technology for stability and support operations.

Dr. Swartout is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has served on the Board of Councilors of the AAAI and is past chair of the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In addi- tion to the JFCOM Transformation Advisory Group, he is a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and the Board on Army Science and Technology of the National Academies.