Keynote speakers:
Nottingham International Consortium on Educational Research (NICER) "Working together: Researchers need Users”.
Nottingham International Consortium on Educational Research (NICER) is a group of people with intellectual disabilities who are interested in research and want to make sure research about intellectual disabilities conducted locally involves people with intellectual disabilities and is informed by their needs and wishes.
Nottingham International Consortium on Educational Research
The group started in 1995 when they took part in a project funded by the European Lifelong Learning Scheme
Since then they have met regularly to review research proposals that involve people with intellectual disabilities and advise on research projects that are running. This includes, for example, writing information sheets, designing pilot work, advising on recruitment and dissemination, testing software and advising on accessibility.
NICER members presented at the 1998 ICDVRAT conference in Skövde as well as at several other international conferences including three International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities (IASSID) meetings in Seattle (2000), Montpelier (2004) and South Africa (2008). The group also teach on masters courses in education at both universities in Nottingham.
To mark their 20 years since they first presented at ICDVRAT, NICER will deliver the first keynote of the conference on their experience of working on research projects and what they have found works best for all involved.
Keynote speaker:
Albert "Skip" Rizzo - Director for Medical Virtual Reality Institute for Creative Technologies Research
Professor USC Davis School of Gerontology and USC Keck School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Psychologist Skip Rizzo conducts research on the design, development and evaluation of virtual reality (VR) systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment rehabilitation and resilience.
This work spans the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations.
Rizzo, whose work using virtual reality-based exposure therapy to treat PTSD received the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Treatment of Trauma, is the associate director for medical virtual reality at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
He also holds research professor appointments with the USC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Rizzo is working with a team that is creating artificially intelligent virtual patients that clinicians can use to practice skills required for challenging clinical interviews and diagnostic assessments. His cognitive work has addressed the use of VR applications to test and train attention, memory, visuospatial abilities and executive function. In the motor domain, he has developed VR game systems to address physical rehabilitation post stroke and traumatic brain injury and for prosthetic use training. He is currently designing VR scenarios to address social and vocational interaction in persons with autistic spectrum disorder.
Rizzo is currently examining the use of VR applications for training emotional coping skills with the aim of preparing service members for the stresses of combat.
He is senior editor of the MIT Press journal, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He also sits on a number of editorial boards for journals in the areas of cognition and computer technology (Cognitive Technology; Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds; Media Psychology) and is the creator of the Virtual Reality Mental Health Email Listserve (VRPSYCH).