Justine Cassell
Location: (Pittsburgh, PA)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.justinecassell.com/
Keywords: Discourse, Dialogue, Natural Language, Embodied Conversational Agents, Educational Technology, Autism
Posted on: Thursday, May 12th, 2011
Broad Research Area: AI / Machine Learning / Robotics / Vision, HCI / CSCW, Other
Research Interests:
Seeking postdoctoral fellow to work on predictive dynamic models of language and nonverbal behavior and integrating them into Embodied Conversational Agents. The candidate should have a background in Computational Linguistics (NLG, Dialogue); should be willing to do significant reading into current approaches (both symbolic and probabalistic) to generating dialogue, should be capable of incorporating recent linguistic and psychological insights into the dyadic, dynamic nature of dialogue, and the integral role played by eye gaze, gesture, posture; and should be willing and able, therefore, to develop more innovative and adequate approaches to generating dialogue. The result will be a radically new way of generating embodied dialogue moves, for an embodied agent that can be more tightly integrated into collaborative scenarios with humans. Applications will include embodied peers that teach literacy and scientific reasoning behaviors, embodied peers that scaffold social behavior in children with autism, and embodied agents that give directions in real and virtual environments.
Professor Cassell is currently faculty at Northwestern University, but will be joining the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Fall, and so the postdoctoral candidate would be located at CMU HCII in Pittsburgh, with access to colleagues in Natural Language Technologies, Machine Learning, and Graphics.
