Please join us on Tuesday, October 11th for our first faculty lecture, followed by a Welcome Reception in our office space.

In this talk Prof. Dunbar details the experiences of one research team in creating two games: MACBETH, a game designed to teach intelligence analysts about cognitive biases, and VERITAS, a game for teaching law enforcement about reliable nonverbal and verbal cues to deception. The process of creating the games using Rapid Iterative Prototyping (RIP) and the experiments testing the effectiveness of the games will be explained.  The challenges of creating games for these communities and the pitfalls and opportunities of studying serious games will be discussed.

Dr. Dunbar is a Professor of Communication at UCSB. She teaches courses in nonverbal and interpersonal communication, communication theory, and deception detection.  She was the Principal Investigator of a $5.4 Million contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in 2011-2013 and has had her research funded by the National Science Foundation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Center for Identification Technology Research. She has published over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has presented over 60 papers at National and International conferences. Her research has appeared in top journals in her discipline including Communication Research, Communication Monographs, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems and Computers in Human Behavior. She has served on the editorial board of six disciplinary journals and will be the Chair of the Nonverbal Division of the National Communication Association in 2014-2016.

All current and interested graduate students, as well as affiliated faculty, are invited back to our office after the talk for wine, cheese, and conversation.