AI Characters
Another major research theme of Prof. Gross is on digital AI characters,
aiming to develop data-driven methods for affect-aware conversational agents,
speech synthesis, and animations to make interactions with digital characters
more natural, engaging, and rewarding.
A large amount of the research is based on the digital Einstein platform.
Developed by ETH Zurich and Animatico - cofounded by Gross and his Ph.D. student,
acquired by Nvidia in 2022, it is an interactive platform where the user
can talk to a digital Albert Einstein character, powered by natural-language
processing and dynamic rendering of the individual's expressions and body language.
Affective computing is also a focus, where gaining awareness of affective states
enables leveraging emotional information as an additional context in order to
design emotionally sentient systems. It can enable digital characters and smartphones
to support enriched interactions that are sensitive to the user's contexts.
Further information is availabe in
cgl.ethz.ch/research/digital_chars.