Charles Averill

Charles Averill

Virtual Intern

Charles Averill is a Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Texas – Dallas and plans to pursue a doctorate in Machine Learning. Charles has taken an interest in promoting ethics in the ML field, along with the role that ML can play in medicine and human biology. He’s also a proponent of open-source software and contributes to OS codebases.

In addition to his work at ECL, Charles has worked on anomaly detection software for the Oil & Gas industry and Natural Language Processing software for postal offices. His current personal research involves novel techniques to improve backpropagation and training runtimes.

Publications

  • Connecting the Brains via Virtual Eyes: Eye-Gaze Directions and Inter-brain Synchrony in VR
    Ihshan Gumilar, Amit Barde, Ashkan Hayati, Mark Billinghurst, Gun Lee, Abdul Momin, Charles Averill, Arindam Dey.

    Gumilar, I., Barde, A., Hayati, A. F., Billinghurst, M., Lee, G., Momin, A., ... & Dey, A. (2021, May). Connecting the Brains via Virtual Eyes: Eye-Gaze Directions and Inter-brain Synchrony in VR. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7).

    BibTexLinksAbstract
    @inproceedings{gumilar2021connecting,
    title={Connecting the Brains via Virtual Eyes: Eye-Gaze Directions and Inter-brain Synchrony in VR},
    author={Gumilar, Ihshan and Barde, Amit and Hayati, Ashkan F and Billinghurst, Mark and Lee, Gun and Momin, Abdul and Averill, Charles and Dey, Arindam},
    booktitle={Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
    pages={1--7},
    year={2021}
    }
    View: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411763.3451583
    Hyperscanning is an emerging method for measuring two or more brains simultaneously. This method allows researchers to simultaneously record neural activity from two or more people. While this method has been extensively implemented over the last five years in the real-world to study inter-brain synchrony, there is little work that has been undertaken in the use of hyperscanning in virtual environments. Preliminary research in the area demonstrates that inter-brain synchrony in virtual environments can be achieved in a mannersimilar to thatseen in the real world. The study described in this paper proposes to further research in the area by studying how non-verbal communication cues in social interactions in virtual environments can afect inter-brain synchrony. In particular, we concentrate on the role eye gaze playsin inter-brain synchrony. The aim of this research is to explore how eye gaze afects inter-brain synchrony between users in a collaborative virtual environment