NEWS

Professor Justine Cassell, Dean’s Chair of Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has taken a leave of absence from CMU to help launch the PRAIRIE institute for interdisciplinary research in AI, located in Paris France. At the same time, she is serving as Senior Researcher at the prestigious computer science research center, Inria.

Cassell has taken advantage of this opportunity to launch a branch of the ArticuLab, located at Inria in the heart of Paris, where she works with PhD students, postdocs, and research engineers, to continue her work on Embodied Conversational Agents, such as the well-known SARA project, and the RAPT peer tutoring system.

In addition to her research, Cassell has been named to the 15 member French Governmental Council on the role of digital technology in society, the CNNUM (Conseil National du Numérique) where she has participated in writing a number of white papers on topics ranging from the role of technology in education, to the status of the human body in tomorrow’s workplace, and participated in a series of debates aimed at ensuring that the citizens of France participate in the important dialogues around technology’s role in our lives.

ArticuLab-France currently has positions for research engineers and postdocs with experience in multimodal dialogue systems. The positions are advertised on Inria’s job website.