Scott Stevens

Scott Stevens has extensive experience in the areas of games, and augmented and virtual reality for education. He has been involved with multimedia research and development for over forty years. Scott began his career at CMU in 1987 in the Software Engineering Institute where he and his research team created the world’s first digital video CD-ROM, a virtual reality learning system that allowed users to carry on conversations with simulated personae.

In 1996 Scott moved to the Human Computer Interaction Institute where he was a co-principle investigator of the Informedia Digital Video Library project. Informedia research applied speech recognition, image processing and machine learning to automatically analyse video. For that work he received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. Also beginning in 1996, he taught part-time at the then newly created Entertainment Technology center. Scott joined the ETC full-time in 2008.

Recently, Scott was the principal investigator on a multi-year research grant to develop games that teach STEM concepts to children, while improving social and emotional learning. This grant was funded by the ENGAGE Program of United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the mandate to ensure a strong, scientifically literate workforce.

Scott received his B.S. and M.S.Ed. degrees in physics from Northern Illinois University and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has spoken internationally on computer science and artificial intelligence’s impact on education and interactive entertainment and has written over one hundred professional papers, talks, and book chapters. He is a holder of three patents related to digital video and Synthetic Interviews.