Congratulations to Joon Hao Chuah for having his IEEE VR workshop paper accepted!

Congratulations to Joon Hao Chuah for having his workshop paper to IEEE VR accepted for presentation! Joon will be presenting his work titled "Experiences in Using a Smartphone as a Virtual Reality Interaction Device" at the IEEE VR 2012 Workshop on Off-The-Shelf Virtual Reality.

Congratulations to Shiva Halan and Dr.Regis Kopper for CHI 2012 publications!

Congratulations to Shiva Halan for getting his Work-in-Progress submission to CHI 2012 accepted! Shiva's work is titled "Constructionism of Virtual Humans to Improve Perceptions of Conversational Partners" and will be published as part of the Extended Abstracts in CHI 2012 Proceedings.

Congratulations to Dr.Regis Kopper for getting his workshop paper submitted to CHI 2012 accepted! Dr.Kopper would be presenting his work titled "Interactive memoirs: Coping with the imminent death and leaving legacies" and will be published as part of the Extended Abstracts in CHI 2012 Proceedings.

Congratulations to Joonhao Chuah!

For having his paper accepted to IEEE Virtual Reality 2012. The paper is titled ""Increasing Agent Physicality to Raise Social Presence and Elicit Realistic Behavior" and also congratulations to co-authors Andrew Robb, Dr. Casey White, Dr. Adam Wendling, and Dr. Samsun Lampotang. The submission was accepted as a short paper and was highly rated in a conference with an acceptance rate of 25-30%, very selective for conference publications. Joon will be presenting his work in Irvine, CA in March, 2012!

Congratulations to Dr. Brent Rossen on having his journal paper accepted to IJHCS

> Congratulations to Dr. Rossen for getting his journal submission titled "A Crowdsourcing Method to Develop Virtual Human Conversational Agents", to the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies!

Hearty congratulations to Dr.Brent Rossen on successfully defending his PhD Thesis!

Brent is now Dr.Brent Rossen! Dr.Rossen successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF CONVERSATIONAL MODELING METHODS FOR INTERPERSONAL SIMULATION" on 21st November 2011. Brent's contribution has been in the field of virtual human conversational modeling and over the course of his research he has proposed, designed, implemented and analyzed four different conversational modeling methods that have significantly reduced the time taken to create a virtual human.

Brent is taking up a full-time position at Microsoft, Seattle starting this January. The VERG family wishes him all the very best in all his future endeavors and thanks him for his contributions!

Congratulations to Brent, Mallory and Vaishnavi for receiving full-time job offers!

Congratulations to VERG graduate students - Brent Rossen, Mallory Mcmanamon and Vaishnavi Krishnan for receiving and accepting full-time job offers from Microsoft, Amazon and VMware respectively!

Brent Rossen interned with Microsoft at Redmond, Seattle during the summer with their Azure team. After successfully completing his summer internship at Microsoft, Brent was offered a full-time position with them. Brent is expected to graduate with his PhD this December and will start working with Microsoft come January!

Mallory Mcmanamon received and accepted an offer with Amazon in Redmond, Seattle. Mallory will be graduating from UF with an MS this December and is expected to start working at Amazon next Spring.

Vaishnavi Krishnan completed a summer internship with VMware at their Palo Alto campus in California and was offered a full-time position on completion. Vaishnavi will be graduating next Spring with an MS and will start working with VMware next summer.

Congrats to all you three and VERG wishes you all the very best in your future endeavors!

Congratulations to Diego on MMVR paper accepted!

Please drop by and congratulate Diego for having his paper "Shader Lamps
Virtual Patients: the Physical Representation of Virtual Patients"
accepted for oral presentation at MMVR 19! Diego will be traveling to
Newport Beach, CA in February 2012 to present along with fellow
collaborators Dr. Henry Fuchs (UNC) and Dr. Greg Welch (UCF).
http://www.nextmed.com/mmvr_program.html for more info!.