Distinguished Lecture Series 2009-2010: Justine Cassell

Getting by with a Little Help from your (Virtual) Friends
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University

Abstract

In this talk I report on a series of studies that attempt to characterize the role of language and nonverbal behavior in relationship-building and rapport in humans, and then to use the results to implement virtual humans capable of rapport with their users. In particular, we are implementing virtual survey interviewers that can use rapport to elicit truthful responses, and virtual direction-giving agents that behave differently as they give directions over the lifetime of use. We are implementing virtual peers that can engage in collaborative learning with children within different dialect communities, virtual peers that can scaffold the learning of rapport behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder, and virtual peers that can be used to assess the social skills deficits of children with autism spectrum disorder so as to better plan their treatment. The goal of the research program is to better understand linguistic and nonverbal coordination devices from the utterance level to the relationship level ­ how they work in humans, how they can be modeled in virtual humans, and how virtual humans can be implemented to help humans have productive and satisfying relationships, with machines and with one another, over long periods of time.

Biography

Justine Cassell holds the AT&T Research Chair and is a full professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Communication Studies at Northwestern University, with courtesy appointments in Linguistics, Psychology, and Learning Science. She is also the director of the Northwestern Center for Technology and Social Behavior, and the director of the new doctoral program in Technology and Social Behavior. Before coming to Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. In 2001, Cassell was awarded the prestigious Edgerton Faculty Award at MIT; in 2008 she was awarded the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award; in 2009 Cassell was made an ACM Distinguished Lecturer. She spent 2008-2009 on sabbatical at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). Cassell's research builds on her multidisciplinary background: she holds undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth and in Lettres Modernes from the Universite de Besançon (France). She holds a M.Phil in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Linguistics and Psychology. After having spent ten years studying verbal and non-verbal aspects of human communication through microanalysis of videotaped data she began to bring her knowledge of human conversation to the design of computational systems. Her current research investigates the relationship between cultural, linguistic and social phenomena, and how this intersection plays out in the display and deployment of identity, both in real and virtual humans. Cassell has authored more than 100 journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters on these topics, and has given more than 50 keynote addresses at international conferences.