Professor
Justine Cassell
Justine Cassell (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a senior researcher in the ALMAnaCH NLP group at Inria Paris, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, with a chair at PR[AI]RIE, the Paris Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She maintains an affiliation with Carnegie Mellon University where she was formerly Associate Dean for Technology Strategy and Impact in the School of Computer Science, co-founder of the Simon Initiative for Technology-Enhanced Learning, co-director (with Tom Mitchell) of InMind, the Project on the future of digital assistants, and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She held courtesy appointments in Linguistics, Psychology, and the CNBC Center for the Neural Bases of Cognition. Cassell came to CMU from Northwestern, where she was the founding director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior and its affiliated joint PhD in Communication and Computer Science. 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 children’s healthy development and learning, particularly for those children in under-resourced schools.
More information is available on Justine’s website.
Researchers
H.Onur Keles
Onur is a Senior Researcher at ArticuLab/INRIA, focusing on the neuroimaging aspects of social interaction/behavior. He was formerly faculty at Ankara University in Turkey. Onur is an expert in the fields of fNIRS, multimodal neuroimaging, and signal analysis. Onur received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Houston in 2015. Afterward, he was a postdoctoral fellow at MGH/Harvard Medical School. During his time at Harvard Medical School, the University of Houston, and Ankara University, he had the opportunity to apply his background in engineering to neuroscience. Onur has published and contributed to more than 60 scientific journals and conference papers during his academic career.
Postodcs
Visiting Researchers
Lab Manager
Sophie Etling
Sophie graduated from Sorbonne University with a degree in Economics, followed by a Master’s in Education from Paris-Saclay. After spending seven years teaching in primary schools, she worked for a year in various fields for a start-up. Now, she coordinates a research team, manages recruitment, and conducts experiments using fNIRS technology. Sophie is eager to develop her skills in the field of research and looks forward to applying her teaching experience to future experiments with children. Outside of work, she enjoys scuba diving, boxing, and theater.
Ph.D Students
Reem Al Najjar
Reem is a doctoral student at INRIA and EDITE/La Sorbonne. She is working with the hyperscanning technique to explore inter-brain synchrony and behavioural features related to social interaction in children in the context of computer-mediated interactions. She holds a Master’s in Neuroscience from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s in Learning Sciences from University Paris Cité. She is passionate about how neuroscience can inform educational practices, particularly the neural mechanisms that underpin learning processes. In her spare time, she enjoys swimming, climbing, and spending time with her dog, Laska.
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.
Research Engineers
Oussama Silem
Oussama is a Research Engineer at INRIA, working on the development of Articulab’s next conversational agent, Son-of-Sara. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science from the Higher National School of Computer Science of Algiers, where he specialized in Computer Systems. Oussama has experience working with large language models, conversational systems, and EEG data analysis. He is passionate about bridging artificial intelligence with fields such as psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience to gain deeper insights into human language. In his free time, Oussama enjoys running, listening to music, and playing video games.
Cindy Evellyn De Araujo Silva
Cindy Evellyn de Araujo Silva is a Research Engineer at INRIA, working within the Neuroscience team. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Portuguese Language from the University of São Paulo in 2018. In her final year, she began working as a Data Engineer consultant for companies across various fields, including finance, logistics, energy, and pharmaceuticals, gaining substantial experience in data processing and analysis. In 2021, she shifted her focus towards the sciences when she was admitted to the interdisciplinary MSc in Life Sciences program at Université Paris Cité, with a focus on Cognitive Neurosciences. Her interests include using linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, AI, and multimodal data analysis to better understand how minds and brains work. For more infos (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyevellyndearaujosilva/).
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 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.
Staff
Master Students
Graduate Research Assistants
Clara Coridon
Clara is a research intern at Inria Paris, where she investigates how rapport is built in French conversations through verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Her work explores how conversational strategies contribute to creating connection and mutual understanding in interaction. She is also completing a Master’s degree in Natural Language Processing, where her thesis explores the adaptation of a coreference resolution model for a French-language corpus of brain-injured patients. Interested in the intersection of linguistics, AI, and human interaction, she enjoys studying how people connect through language.
Whether swimming, scuba diving, or lifeguarding, she enjoys being by the water. She also likes running and spending time with friends.
Giovanni Duca
Giovanni is a trainee at ALMAnaCH in Inria Paris, working on reinforcement learning techniques to improve conversational grounding in dialogue systems. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento (CIMeC), specializing in Computational and Theoretical Modeling of Language and Cognition. His research interests include pragmatics, NLP, machine learning, and multimodal models. Beyond his research, Giovanni has experience in tutoring and mentoring and serves as a student representative at his university. Outside of academia, he enjoys immersing himself in different languages and cultures, staying active through hiking and yoga, and indulging in the arts through concerts, cinema, and museum visits.
More information is available on Giovanni’s GitHub.
Imani Stone
Imani is an M2 student in the Dual Masters program between University College London, Sorbonne Universite, and Ecole Normale Superieure. In 2023 she completed her M1 at UCL in Brain and Mind Sciences and is currently enrolled in the Biologie et Integrative Physiologie-Neurosciences program at Sorbonne. With the ArticuLab, she is working on an fNIRS hyperscanning project investigating social collaboration in children.
When not in the lab you can find her enjoying her hobbies of writing poetry and short stories, listening to music, reading, and running.
Barokshana Baskaran
Barokshana is an intern at Articulab, participating in a project entitled: ‘Peer collaboration and its impact on learning’, an fNIRS hyperscanning study. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences in 2023 at Paris-Est Créteil University. She is currently in the second year of her Master’s degree in Integrative Biology and Physiology, specializing in the Cognitive and Behavioral Neurosciences track, at Sorbonne University. With a strong attachment to her mother tongue ‘Tamil’, Barokshana is also pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Tamil Studies. This is why she enjoys writing poems, listening to music, and watching movies in Tamil.
Gabrielle Alimi
Gabrielle is an intern at INRIA. She is working on ArticuLab’s new project called 3 tasks. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in life sciences at Sorbonne Université in 2023. She is currently in her second year of BIP (Integrative Biology and Physiology) Master’s degree at Sorbonne Université in the NCC (Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience) specialization. What interests her the most about neuroscience is the link that exists between brain activity, human behavior, and psychology. In her free time, she is passionate about basketball, fashion, and animals.
Zofia Milczarek
Zofia is a Master’s student in Computational Linguistics at Université Paris Cité. She joined ArticuLabo as an intern to work on the Natural Language Generation module of the future Son-of-Sara system. Her research interests include ensuring the naturalness of LLM-generated language, with the use of methods such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning. Outside the lab, you can find her at the local cinema or going through a second-hand bookshop.