ABOUT HIA

Our mission is to empower businesses to delight their audiences with intimate, intelligent and efficient engagement. Using our advanced Human Interface Agent (HIA) technology, businesses can conduct complex conversations with large numbers of people concurrently, and make each interaction much more personalized, consistent and accountable.

HIA sits squarely at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and VR to break through the limitations of typical text bots or voice-based question/answer dialog. HIA goes all the way to produce true two-way visualized Artificial Intelligence exchanges that allow the user to experience meaningful human interactions, not just interactivity.

Conversational Virtual Reality isn't just practical; it's delightful!

With our patented VHware™ authoring and publishing tools, businesses, educators, and artists will be able to easily create brand-sensitive virtual agents who can verbally and visually conduct complex conversations.

We solve the problem of scaling customer engagements. Millions of simultaneous personalized 1:1 customer, audience, or employee interactions are straightforward with HIA.

Scaling Medical, HR, Brand Marketing, Social, or other areas requiring B2B or B2C human touch points is now efficient via a custom branded character or realistic virtual human agent that can emulate real human interactions, tell stories, verbalize real-time data feeds, ask and answer questions, and then extract, report, and deliver normalized actionable data about the encounter.

HIA's product offering leverages exclusive intellectual property rights to groundbreaking R&D representing over ten years and one hundred million dollars in advanced Artificial Intelligence and Oscar-winning Virtual Reality from the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies.


WHAT WE DO


• We create brand-sensitive conversational engagement to delight your audience
• We craft digital characters or photorealistic digital doubles to captivate your users
• We incorporate dynamic body language and facial expression in compelling personas
• We enable always on, always-available one-to-one dialogs to support your mission
• We deliver a compelling brand experience across all mobile and immersive displays
• We produce experiential content spanning text, voice, VR, AR, MR as well as 360 Video.
• We report detailed analytics about each encounter
• We bring transactional delightfulness to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary
• We love what we do, and it shows!

Stay tuned in the coming months for more detailed information about our products. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us using the form below.

HIA

Team

Vacit Arat

Chief Executive Officer and President

Vacit is known for pioneering leading-edge technologies in fields ranging from semiconductors and software to medical and defense. His extensive experience includes leadership roles in engineering, operations and business management, including international experience with Japanese, European, Chinese, Korean and Israeli corporations.

He led five startups as CEO, three of which as a co-founder. His tenure includes Samsung Semiconductor, LSI Logic, Honeywell, Silicon Value (Silicon Design Systems), Microfabrica, Crosspoint, On-Chip Systems, Vantage Surgical and IBM Microelectronics. Vacit holds a BSEE from the University of Birmingham, U.K., and a MSEE from the University of Houston, TX. He has 13 issued patents; and over 25 pending applications.

Richard Cardran

Chief Creative Officer / VP Strategy

For over 20 years, Richard has been a successful entrepreneur, thought leader, and creative technologist. As the founder of a media products and services company (now a part of Ericsson), he led numerous ground-breaking interactive media initiatives for Time Warner, Viacom, AOL, Sony, Disney, ABC, FOX, Comedy Central, MTV, Intel, Omnicom, Microsoft, and many others. Additionally, Richard has provided enterprise digital master planning for The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and The American Film Institute (AFI).

Richard is a multiple Emmy® winner working at the intersection of strategy, creative invention, media technology, and consumer experience. Richard co-chairs the Experience Design Working Group at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences promoting industry innovation and excellence in XR, UX, VUI, and AI. Richard was honored by the Hollywood Reporter/Producers Guild of America's year-end "Digital 50" outstanding media professionals as well as Streaming Magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People in Streaming." He is also an eight-time finalist and two-time winner of Emmy Awards for "Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Television" and "Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology."

Steve LaValle

Chief Scientist

Steve is a renowned entrepreneur and a professor with deep expertise in a broad set of technologies, including VR, robotics, computer vision, filtering, sensor fusion, AI, control systems, and perceptual psychology. Until recently, he was the Chief Scientist of VR/AR/MR at Huawei, and prior to that, the Chief Scientist at Oculus VR until its $2 billion Facebook acquisition in 2014.

Since 2001, he has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while also teaching courses at Stanford and Iowa State. He has three books published on VR and robotics, and over 150 scientific articles. Steve holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois.

Dina Morales

VP of Client Services

As one of the first digital producers in LA, Dina comes to us from leading advertising agencies Ogilvy, McCann, Deutsch, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Wieden+Kennedy. She was a copywriter and broadcast producer before jumping into never-been-done-before digital experiences. She brings perspective from roles in client services, creative development, integrated production and new business.

For 20 years Dina led campaign and product delivery for clients including Apple, HP, Lexus, Infiniti, Honda, EA Sports, ESPN, Mattel, Disney, A&E, Levi’s, Revlon and McDonald’s. While building digital departments, she launched experiments using new technology for Sprint, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nissan, Google, CNN and Microsoft. These teams have been honored by Cannes Cyber Lions, The Webbys, FWA, D&AD Awards and Ad Age Awards.

Danny Lange, Ph.D

Advisor

Danny is currently the VP of AI and Machine Learning at Unity Technologies. He joined Unity from Uber, where he was the head of machine learning, leading the efforts to build the world’s most versatile Machine Learning platform to support Uber’s hyper growth. Previously, he was the General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning -- an AWS product that offers Machine Learning as a Cloud Service.

Before Amazon, he was Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he led a product team focused on large-scale Machine Learning for Big Data. He also spent 8 years on Speech Recognition Systems, first as CTO of General Magic, Inc., then through his work on General Motor’s OnStar Virtual Advisor, one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until Siri. Danny started his career as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research. He holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society and has several patents to his credit.

Ted Schilowitz

Advisor

Ted Schilowitz Ted is currently the Futurist in Residence at Paramount Pictures, working with technology teams at both Viacom and Paramount. Prior to that, he was the Futurist at 20th Century Fox where he worked on the evolving art and science of advanced motion picture creation. Ted was founding member, first employee, and integral part of the product development team at RED Digital Cinema, which has made a significant impact on the Motion Picture Industry, with many of the world's biggest movies now being shot with these ultra-high resolution digital movie cameras.

He is also one of the founders and creators of the G-Tech product line of advanced hard drive storage products that are implemented worldwide for professional Television and Multimedia content creation. He has been featured in Wired, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, NBC, Studio Daily, Videography, Film and Video, DV magazine, TV Technology, HD Video Pro Magazine, Digital Television Magazine, Engadget, Gizmodo, Millimeter, American Cinematographer, MacWorld, Post magazine, Popular Science, LA Times and countless other trade publications and mainstream press, discussing technology and product advancements in his areas of expertise.

William H. Collier

Advisor

Bill has been recognized repeatedly as one of Southern California’s “Super Lawyers” by the editors of Law and Politics Magazine and for more than 20 years by Best Lawyers in America, a publication of Woodward White. Bill is currently a Board Member of Cedars Sinai Health System as well as a Board of Trustees and past Chairman of Torrance Memorial Medical Center.

Born in Galveston, Texas, Bill graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas where he was President of Sid Richardson College and Chairman of the University’s Honor Council. He has a J.D. degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. He is currently admitted to practice law in the courts of Texas, Louisiana and California. Before joining a private law practice on the U.S. West Coast, Bill served as in-house counsel with El Paso LNG Co. in Houston.

Todd Carlisle, Ph.D

Advisor

Todd Carlisle is currently the VP of People at Ipsy, an online beauty subscription and media company. Prior to that, as the VP of HR at Twitter, he led the global teams of HR Business Partners, People Analytics, HR Systems, and Recruiting.

Before Twitter, Todd spent 11 years at Google where he founded the People Analytics team, was a Director of Recruiting whose teams hired 5000 people, and acted as a Director of HR for the Trust & Safety team. His work at on topics such as scientific hiring, the wisdom of crowds, and performance management has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Harvard Business Review. Todd has a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Texas A&M University.

Dave Gafni

Project Manager

Dave has over 25 years of planning and managing a very wide variety of technology endeavors. From corporate IT infrastructure implementation, software design and development, cyber security processes and procedures, to complete residential and commercial automation systems. Over the years he has managed software and IT projects in support of multi-billion dollar US DoD projects at major aerospace companies, as well as coordinated both in-house and remote teams worldwide on a wide variety of projects.

As a certified Project Management Professional, Dave is passionate about all aspects of project delivery, From configuration and change control, to risk management, to monitoring quality assurance and control. Dave provides the hands-on team and project lifecycle success HIA customers require.

Harry Nelson

Advisor

Harry Nelson is the founder and Managing Partner of Nelson Hardiman, LLP, the largest sole healthcare and life sciences law firm in Los Angeles. Harry has earned a national reputation as a leading expert on the future of U.S. healthcare, and is frequently called on to make sense of the most complex aspects of our healthcare system, delivering valuable insights for healthcare providers, government, consumers, employers, and investors.

Government regulators and policymakers have turned to Nelson to advise on the most sensitive and challenging emerging health policy issues. He testifies regularly as an expert on healthcare compliance standards, including data privacy, corporate practice of medicine, and other issues.

He is also the co-author of the 2017 book, From ObamaCare to Trumpcare: Why You Should Care, about the past, present and future of U.S. health policy. Harry has been recognized by Best Lawyers, Southern California Super Lawyers, and received a Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent rating annually since 2010.

Kathy Mandato

Advisor

Kathy is a transformational people and operations leader with extensive background in human resources, marketing and business development. She has more than 20 years experience as a trusted advisor to companies including Snap, Inc. where she most recently served as its VP Human Resources. She has expertise in building operational excellence and strong cultures and has helped scale and transform many companies through roles including EVP of HR at NBCUniversal, Sr, VP of HR at Comcast Entertainment, and Head of HR at DreamWorks Animation, and VP New Business Development & Communications at BBDO.

Sharon Banh

Content Guru

Sharon brings a creative focus within HIA's UX and authoring tools for our original content creation, content ingestion, and conversational interactive content styling and presentation. Sharon also brings the critical analysis needed for identifying the actions and branching used for things like Emotional Event Triggers, Natural Body Language, Facial Expression, and Phonetics Acuity for HIA's artificial intelligence system.

These subtle but powerful cognitive science applications in content creation, design, and execution processes are what in part delivers on the "delightfulness" of the user experience and creative interaction design qualities of HIA virtual humans. She helps bring our Virtual Humans to life!