Jeremy Bailenson

Director, Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University

Mehdi Britel:
617-252-2372
mehdi_britel@monitor.com

Mel Blake:
617-252-2472
mel_blake@monitor.com

More Human than Human

In a given day, children between the ages of eight and eighteen spend twice as much time using "avatars" online—digital representations of themselves—than they do reading books.

Digital Footprints

There is a famous New Yorker cartoon which shows a dog using a computer, with the caption "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog." Today, however, on-line anonymity is not so easily achieved.

More Human than Human

In a given day, children between the ages of eight and eighteen spend twice as much time using "avatars" online—digital representations of themselves—than they do reading books. How do we navigate this new world in which digital media is often chosen over face to face interaction? Jeremy Bailenson believes it is possible to leverage the "fluid" nature of avatars to create applications that make us "more human than human." For example, teachers can tailor their avatars to fit specific needs of students, automatically morphing facial expressions, voice, race and gender to match the social needs of various demographics. Moreover, in a class of one-hundred students, the teacher can present different versions of herself simultaneously such that each student gets the perfectly tailored version of a tutor in real-time. Far from being impersonal and cold, virtual interactions can utilize idealized versions of people, ones that create opportunities that simply don't exist face to face. These ideas are not science fiction. In this compelling presentation, Jeremy will provides case examples where avatars have been used in such scenarios as negotiation, teaching, sales, and politics where virtual avatars actually outperformed their human counterparts using these transformations.

Digital Footprints

There is a famous New Yorker cartoon which shows a dog using a computer, with the caption "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog." Today, however, on-line anonymity is not so easily achieved. Each visit to a virtual space leaves clues—your digital footprint—that in many ways are far richer than what occurs face to face. For a decade, Jeremy Bailenson has worked with governments, the automobile industry and educators to understand the power and impact of the digital footprint. His research has shown that behaviors captured in virtual worlds can predict not only the demographics of the visitor—age, gender, race—but more importantly, they can predict mental state—fatigue, personality, and likelihood of errors. And with advancements in technology—consider Microsoft Kinect and its ability to track body movements with accuracy and resolution never seen before—tracking digital footprints is now possible in large scale contexts. Using relatively simple statistical learning algorithms, Jeremy can parse this online behavior to build profiles of people to a stunning degree of detail. He is using this technology to build sensors for corporations (e.g., Nissan, Toyota, and Konica Minolta) who seek to automatically detect work behaviors such as quality of collaboration, probability of high creativity, and error prediction. It turns out that we can tell you are a dog after all.

Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution

(William Morrow, April 2011)

Jeremy Bailenson is an expert on human interaction in virtural environments. He is the founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, marketing, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality. He is the coauthor of Infinite Reality, the canonical book on the psychology of virtual reality, which has had a major impact in many contexts, for example corporate strategy, supreme court deliberation, and national security.

"Your Kinect Is Watching You" (Slate, March 7, 2012)

"The Reality of The Virtual" (The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011)

"Our Avatars, Ourselves" (PBS, September 6, 2011)

"A Museum of Virtual Media" (Natural History)

Virtual Human Interaction Lab