Institute for Creative Technologies


The Institute for Creative Technologies is a research institute of the University of Southern California located in Playa Vista, California. ICT was established in 1999 with funding from the US Army.
Dr. Mike Andrews, chief scientist of the US Army is described as "founder of and inspiration behind" the ICT. He followed up on discussions between US Army leadership and Disney Imagineering president Bran Ferren, on how to gain access to Hollywood entertainment industry expertise in high-technology areas such as computer-based Modeling & Simulation, and Virtual Reality. The name was derived from Ferren's title at The Walt Disney Company.
It was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation. The institute's research has also led to applications for education, entertainment and rehabilitation, including virtual patients, virtual museum guides and Academy Award-winning visual effects technologies. Core areas include virtual humans, graphics, mixed-reality, learning sciences, games, storytelling and medical virtual reality.

Senior Management

.,
Executive Director
Cheryl Birch,
Director of Finance, Administration, and Human Resources
Clarke Lethin,
Managing Director
William Swartout,
Director of Technology

Directors

Andrew Gordon, Director of Interactive Narrative Research
Jonathan Gratch, Director of Virtual Humans Research
Hao Li, Director of Vision & Graphics Lab
Ryan McAlinden, Director of Modeling, Simulation and Training
Benjamin Nye, Director of Learning Science Research
David Pynadath, Director of Social Simulation Research
Todd Richmond, Director of Mixed Reality Lab/Studio + Advanced Prototypes
Albert "Skip" Rizzo, Director of Medical Virtual Reality
Paul Rosenbloom, Director of Cognitive Architecture Research
David Traum, Director of Natural Language Research
Arno Hartholt, Director of Research and Development Integration
Rob Groome, IT Director
Richard DiNinni, Project Director
Matthew Trimmer, Project Director
Julia Campbell, Project Director
Stefan Scherer, Associate Director for Neural Information Processing

Faculty and Academics

About a dozen ICT researchers hold academic appointments at various schools and departments across USC. These include research professors, research associate professors and research assistant professors in Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the USC Davis School of Gerontology.
ICT also has several post-docs and hosts university-level interns each summer.
Notable researchers include:
Notable engineers include:
Established in 1999, ICT is a DoD-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center working in collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to further advance research and development efforts for societal benefit in areas including veterans issues, mental health support, rehabilitation and job training.