Professor
Justine Cassell
Justine Cassell (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Associate Dean of the School of Computer Science for Technology Strategy and Impact at Carnegie Mellon University, Co-Founder of the Simon Initiative for Technology-Enhanced Learning, and until recently, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science. Cassell comes to CMU from Northwestern, where she was the founding director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior joint PhD in Communication and Computer Science, and of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Before Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured faculty member at the MIT Media Lab, where she headed the Gesture and Narrative Language research group. Cassell’s research focuses on understanding natural forms of communication, and then creating technological tools for those forms of communication and linguistic expression to flourish in the digital world. In particular, she is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. More recently Cassell has investigated the role that the virtual peer (a child-sized version of the Embodied Conversational Agent) can play in children’s lives, and has demonstrated that the virtual peer can play an important role in scaffolding learning, particularly for those children in under-resourced schools.
More information is available on Justine’s website.
Researchers
Emer Gilmartin
Emer is a Post-Doc working on the KETI project with Professor Justine Cassell at Inria, Paris. She is developing a novel theory of interpersonality – how personality traits of different interlocutors affect conversational progress. Emer’s Ph.D., pursued at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Profs Nick Campbell and Carl Vogel, focused on multiparty casual conversation, particularly in terms of timing of speech, silence, and overlap in chat and chunk phases. Prior to her return to academia as a mature student, Emer worked in the design, coordination, and provision of language and integration training to refugees in Ireland, as part of IILT, a campus company of Trinity College Dublin. She carries on this work through her side project, ListenHere (https://listenhere.ie), a non-profit providing free online resources for migrants.
Ph.D Students
Alafate Abulimiti
Alafate is a doctoral student at INRIA and ENS/PSL. His primary area of research is the conversational strategies generation using cutting-edge NLG methods. Conversational strategies often refer to the ways of speaking that carry out the conversation helping the user to accomplish both task and social goals. He is also interested in various domains related to human-human interaction, such as dialogue reasoning, social science, and cognitive science. Before his Ph.D. program, he was a research intern in Université de Paris working on Dialogue and Semantics. He has a computer science engineering degree and a master’s degree in data science from Université de Tours. Lastly, he enjoys playing chess, reading, and writing in his spare time. You can find more info in his personal website.
Biswesh Mohapatra
Biswesh is a doctoral student at INRIA and ENS/PSL. His research interest lies in multi-modal computational models of human conversations. He has experience working in various other fields such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, and negotiation agents. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked as a research engineer at Articulab for a year where his primary role was to re-build the entire pipeline for SARA. He completed his Masters in Computer Science from IIIT Bangalore where he interned at companies like IBM Research, Seimens Research, and also was a Google Summer of Codes scholar where he contributed to the open-source organisation “OpenStreetMaps”. Outside the lab, you can find him taking part in hiking, playing badminton and singing terribly!!
More information could be found on his website.
Master Students
Visiting Scholar
Lab Manager
Jade Jenkins
Jade serves as lab manager of the ArticuLab and also as a research engineer at Inria/ENS. Her research is largely interested in using state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques and interdisciplinary approaches to investigate creative and socially-informed questions about behavior, learning, and performance. She holds a Master of Science in Gerontology Research from the University of Southampton (UK) and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of New Orleans (USA). Her previous work has investigated the role of culture and bias in adaptations of behavioral assessments for diverse populations, cognitive event-related potentials of language and memory in older adults with dementia, and the use of brain modulation in developing language-therapy interventions for children with an autism spectrum disorder. Outside of the lab, Jade is an adept cook, an avid reader, and thoroughly enjoys a sunny day spent on a terrace with her dog, Guppy.
Staff
Graduate Research Assistants
Seemab Hassan
Seemab is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Information Technology University, Punjab, where she discovered her passion for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her fascination with NLP motivated her to pursue further studies in this field. As part of her internship, she is currently building test cases to better understand large neural network-based dialog models. When not occupied with academic and professional activities, Seemab enjoys immersing herself in nature and expressing her creativity through her culinary Instagram page, @semifryday, where she shares her love for food and its simple pleasures.