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.
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 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
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.
Graduate Research Assistants
Reem Al Najjar
Reem is an intern at Inria. 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.
Théo Charlot
Théo is a Master’s student in Natural Language Processing at Nantes Université. He joined the ArticuLab as an intern to work on Representation and Storage of the Grounding task in LLMs without using the context of the model. Outside of the lab he likes to read and question himself on reasoning, subjectivity and consciousness. Though you’ll have more chances of finding him at a restaurant or taking pictures of little moments of life.
Mathilde Deletombe
Mathilde is a Master’s student in Language Sciences, specializing in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing at the University of Orléans. She joined ArticuLabo as an intern to work on the Connivence project, a linguistic study focused on analyzing how rapport is built between two people. Her research interests include the fields of semantics and pragmatics, as well as the verbal and non-verbal analysis of conversations. Outside of working hours, she enjoys the art of photography and always enjoys spending time in bookstores and playing video games.
Anna Celina Desiderio
Celina is a master’s student in theoretical and experimental linguistics at Université Paris Cité. Her research interests include the semantics of discourse relations and documentation of her mother tongue, Tagalog, and other Philippine-type languages. She is currently working as an intern for ArticuLabo focusing on the study of human communication and speech data analysis. Outside work and studies, she likes to do yoga and has been dedicated to the aerial arts for 5 years.
Diana Bakina
Diana is a Master’s student in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics at Université Paris Cité. She is currently an intern analyzing the structure of human communication using a spoken language corpus, employing Python and R for her analysis. Diana’s research interests lie in the realms of semantics and pragmatics. Additionally, she has extensive experience in developing chatbots, from designing conversational flows to implementing natural language processing algorithms, which she has applied in various practical and research settings.
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-had bookshop.
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.