PEOPLE

Professor

Justine_Cassell

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

Hao Wang

Hao Wang

Hao WANG is currently working as a Pre-Doc on conversational grounding for Dialogue System. He has experience in Computer Vision, NLP and multimodal ML. Hao graduated from french engineering school CentraleSupélec with engineer degree, majored on Applied math and Data Science. He enjoys in his spare time, music from classical music to Rap and exploring the restaurant in Paris!

Emer Gilmartin

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

Biswesh Mohapatra

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

Staff

Marius Le Chapelier

Marius Le Chapelier

Marius is a Research Engineer working on Articulab’s new dialogue system called Son of Sara (SARA project’s sequel). This system will imply real-time processing of multimodal data streams (audio, video) gathered from the system’s interlocutor, and the generation of such streams through a new Embodied Conversational Agent developed in Unity. Marius graduated with a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Sorbonne Université in 2022. He has experience with various AI subfields like reinforcement learning, deep learning, multi-agent systems and has a wide range of programming skills. In his free time, he enjoys playing any sport (especially volleyball) and is a board game enthusiast.

Sinem Demirkan

Sinem Demirkan

Sinem is a research engineer working on the neural basis of social connectivity in children. She holds a Bachelor’s in Life Sciences from Sorbonne University and a Master’s in Neuroscience from Ecole Normale Supérieure-PSL. Previously, she investigated the relative contribution of facial regions in the perception of emotions at TU Graz, Austria, and the electrophysiological markers of preclinical AD at KU Leuven, Belgium. In her current role, she employs fNIRS hyperscanning, a technique for simultaneous brain activity measurement, to observe the neural dynamics of social interaction. With a focus on children aged 5-12, her goal is to integrate this insight into the team’s development of an empathetic AI tool customized for educational purposes. Sinem is passionate about interdisciplinary research and treasures connections with diverse minds. Beyond the lab, she enjoys being active in nature, travelling and capturing life through photopgrahy.

Graduate Research Assistants

Mira Lee

Mira Lee

Mira is a master student at Sungkyunkwan University in electrical and computer engineering. She is an intern working on human attribute extraction and speech analysis in human-human interaction. She worked as a researcher at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute, undertaking the role of the Korean delegate for Artificial Intelligence ISO/IEC standardization, and participating in national R&D projects in Korea.

Qinyue Xu

Qinyue Xu

Qinyue is a master student at Bordeaux Montaigne University in language sciences. She is an intern working on data annotation and conversational strategies in human-human interaction. She is interested in human-machine interaction and the application of linguistics in this field. During free time, she likes visiting museums and playing games.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

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