Justine Cassell

Most Recent Affiliation(s):

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab

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Bio:

• SIGGRAPH 2000

  Justine Cassell is faculty at MIT’s Media Laboratory. After ten years studying human communication through microanalysis of videotaped data, Cassell began to bring her knowledge of human conversation to the design of computational systems, co-designing the first autonomous animated agent with speech, gesture, intonation and facial expression in 1994. She is currently implementing the third generation of embodied conversational character. The architecture for this new agent is based on conversational functions, allowing the system to exploit users’ natural speech, gesture and head movement in the input to organize conversation, and to respond with autonomous appropriate verbal and nonverbal behaviors of its own.  

  SIGGRAPH 1999

  Justine Cassell is faculty at MIT’s Media Laboratory. After ten years studying human communication through microanalysis of videotaped data, Cassell began to bring her knowledge of human conversation to the design of computational systems, co-designing the first autonomous animated agent with speech, gesture, intonation and facial expression in 1994. She is currently implementing the third generation of embodied conversational character. The architecture for this new agent is based on conversational functions, allowing the system to exploit users’ natural speech, gesture and bead movement in the input to organize conversation, and to respond with autonomous appropriate verbal and nonverbal behaviors of its own.  

  SIGGRAPH 1996

  Justine Cassell is faculty at MIT’s Media Laboratory, where she heads the Gesture and Narrative Language Group. Previously she was National Science Foundation Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Fellow of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds two PhDs from the University of Chicago; one in Linguistics, and one in Psychology. Her research interests include the relationship between verbal and nonverbal behavior, autonomous animated conversing agents, and interactive storytelling systems designed for and by adults and children. Her work on integrating gesture, speech, and facial expression in autonomous animated conversing agents has been presented, among other places, at SIGGRAPH ’94.