Associate Professor Christian Jones is both an academic and commercial entrepreneur. He has a successful track record of managing large-scale academic research projects and spinning out Intellectual Property for industrial commercialisation.
He joined USC in November 2006 to build collaborative research projects across the University and with local, national and international industry and government. Immediately prior to this he was a lecturer in computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as founder and CEO of a UK-based emotion engineering company, Affective Media.
He heads up large scale collaborative projects in serious games, social learning, affective computing (emotion), mobile communications, location-based services, speech technologies, human computer interaction, and gaming, multimedia and animation.
His recent research into affective computing considers how to develop systems that can automatically recognise human emotion and respond appropriately. He has developed systems that recognise human emotion from speech and from biometric sensors, and has applied these systems to create emotionally intelligent cars, robotics, mobile communications, customer relationship management, audio players and computer games.
He is interested in serious games and games for change. Working with the Queensland Police Service, the Crime and Misconduct Commission, the Daniel Morcombe Foundation and Education Queensland, has developed Being Safety Smart, a free to use online computer game to provide safety strategies for children aged from 6 to 8. He is now developing a free to use online game for children aged 8 to 10 to learn strategies to protect themselves from sexual abuse and support for disclosures, in partnership with the Telstra Foundation, Queensland Police Service, Daniel Morcombe Foundation, Education Queensland, Sunshine Cooloola Services Against Sexual Violence Inc and Laurel House. He is also leading the web-based education and visualisation project on climate change and environmental management as part of the A$1.9M Smart Forest Alliance Queensland project.
He is developing location-based systems which can monitor and guide visitors around environmentally sensitive and remote regions to reduce their environmental impact and offer sustainability, such as Fraser Island, Queensland. Additionally, he is developing location-based system which can allow scientists to record changes to the environment such as fire risk and damage.
He has collaborations with Toyota, Ford Motors (USA), Stanford University, Edinburgh University and telecommunications and computer game developers. His work has been published in international conferences and journals, and also covered in the New Scientist, Newsweek International, Beyond Tomorrow, and the BBC.
Christian's PhD (conferred 1998) developed a talking-head animation systems capable of automatically lip synching to speech and he has worked with a wide range of speech-enabled technologies, including video compression, immersive virtual reality, entertainment, e-business and interactive digital television. This work enveloped many technical disciplines including speech physiology, communicative psychology and sociology, together with acoustic analysis, speech recognition and computer-based facial modelling and animation.
Christian is interested in supporting the interactions between humans and computers to create entertaining, engaging, usable and commercially viable products.
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