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
H.Onur Keles
Onur is a Visiting Researcher at ArticuLab/INRIA, focusing on the neuroimaging aspects of social interaction/behavior. 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.
Ph.D Students
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
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.
Staff
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.