Synthetic Personas Lab

The primary focus of the Synthetic Personas Lab is dedicated to advancing the field of virtual humans. My work focuses on developing intelligent and empathetic digital human-like entities that can engage in human-like interactions. 

My work spans various domains, from healthcare and education to multilingual scenarios and entertainment. We will focus on creating virtual humans that can understand and respond to human verbal and non-verbal input, tailor their behavior to different users, and provide meaningful assistance and support. 

By pushing the boundaries of computing and human-computer interaction, our lab aims to revolutionize the way people interact with technology, making this interaction more intuitive, effective, and enjoyable for users around the world. 

Reilly, E.D., Kathawalla, U.K., Robins, H.E., Heapy, A.A., Hogan, T.P., Waring, M.E., Quigley, K.S., Drebing, C.E., Bickmore, T., Volonte, M. and Kelly, M.M., 2023. An online acceptance and mindfulness intervention for chronic pain in veterans: development and protocol for a pilot feasibility randomized controlled trial. JMIR Research Protocols, 12(1), p.e45887. 

Volante, M., Babu, S.V., Chaturvedi, H., Newsome, N., Ebrahimi, E., Roy, T., Daily, S.B. and Fasolino, T., 2016. Effects of virtual human appearance fidelity on emotion contagion in affective inter-personal simulations. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 22(4), pp.1326-1335.

Volonte, M., Anaraky, R.G., Knijnenburg, B., Duchowski, A.T. and Babu, S.V., 2019, September. Empirical evaluation of the interplay of emotion and visual attention in human-virtual human interaction. In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2019 (pp. 1-9). 

Volonte, M., Wang, C.C., Ebrahimi, E., Hsu, Y.C., Liu, K.Y., Wong, S.K. and Babu, S.V., 2021, March. Effects of language familiarity in simulated natural dialogue with a virtual crowd of digital humans on emotion contagion in virtual reality. In 2021 IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (pp. 188-197). IEEE. 

Yun, H.S., Volonte, M. and Bickmore, T., 2022, September. Motivating health behavior change with a storytelling virtual agent. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 1-3). 

Wang, C.C., Volonte, M., Ebrahimi, E., Liu, K.Y., Wong, S.K. and Babu, S.V., 2022, March. An evaluation of native versus foreign communicative interactions on users’ behavioral reactions towards affective virtual crowds. In 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (pp. 340-349). IEEE.  

Volonte, M., Ofek, E., Jakubzak, K., Bruner, S. and Gonzalez-Franco, M., 2022, March. Headbox: A facial blendshape animation toolkit for the microsoft rocketbox library. In 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (pp. 39-42). IEEE.