An Embodied Conversational Agent for the Web

Igor S. Pandzic is currently a Visiting Scientist at the University of Linköping, Sweden, as well as a Visiting Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Formerly he worked as a Senior Assistant at MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland, where he obtained his PhD in 1998. The same year he worked as visiting scientist at AT&T Labs, USA. Igor received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zagreb in 1993, and MSc degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the University of Geneva in 1994 and 1995, respectively. His current research interests focus on Virtual Characters for the Internet and mobile platforms, and include Networked Collaborative Virtual Environments, facial analysis and synthesis, computer generated film production and parallel computing. He published one book and around 50 papers on these topics. Igor is a member of the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) and contributed to the MPEG-4 International Standard for which he received an ISO Certificate of Appreciation in 2000. He is involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching activities at Linköping and Zagreb Universities, respectively. He served in Program Committees of numerous conferences.

Karlo Smid has a University degree of B.Sc.E.E. of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He has been working for the Ericsson Nikola Tesla in Zagreb, Croatia since June 2000. His work includes software design and its implementation using various programming languages (mostly Java and C++) on both Windows and Unix platforms. In 2000 he started postgraduate study on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. His current interests are embodied virtual agents. With dr. Igor S. Pandzic he will present his work on the “15th International Conference on Computer Animation in Geneva.