معرفی
Justine Cassell is an SCS Dean's Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also serves as associate dean for technology strategy and impact. She is director emerita of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and co-director of CMU's Simon Initiative and Yahoo-InMind collaboration. Additionally, she is a senior researcher in the ALMAnaCH NLP group at INRIA Paris and holds the founding international chair at the PRAIRIE Paris Institute on Interdisciplinary Research in AI. She maintains courtesy appointments in Psychology, Linguistics, and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
Cassell earned her DEUG in Literature from the Université de Besançon, an M.Litt in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, and a dual Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Psychology and Linguistics. Her academic journey includes founding director roles at the Center for Technology and Social Behavior and the Technology and Social Behavior joint Ph.D. program at Northwestern University, as well as a tenured professorship at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group.
Cassell's research focuses on human-human conversation and storytelling, progressively evolving to develop computational systems that can participate in these activities. She is credited with developing Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), virtual humans capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. Her work increasingly addresses the impact of these technologies on learning and communication, particularly through virtual peer systems for children's language and literacy development, and studying online communities' effects on young people's self-esteem and sense of community.
Her recent publications demonstrate a clear trajectory toward increasingly sophisticated multimodal interaction systems, with growing emphasis on social bonding, neural synchrony, and the application of conversational AI in educational contexts. The research shows progression from basic conversational agents to complex systems that model social dynamics and support learning through virtual peers, with recent work exploring large language models' role in conversational grounding and the application of multimodal approaches to studying social bonds.
- Edgerton prize at MIT (2001)
- Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award for Leadership (2008)
- AAAS Fellow (2012)
- Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellow (2016)
- ACM Fellow (2016)
- Henry and Bryna David prize for social science applicable to public policy (2018)
- Honorary doctorate by the University of Edinburgh (2023)
Cassell has been instrumental in developing numerous research initiatives including the Simon Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning and the Yahoo InMind Project on the Future of Personal Assistants. Her work has received significant funding for projects investigating virtual peer technology for children with autism, scaffolding science achievement in culturally diverse classrooms, and connection machines studying nonverbal behaviors in conversation. She has advised numerous students and researchers who have gone on to make significant contributions in human-computer interaction, social computing, and educational technology.
As director of the HCII and through her current research leadership roles, Cassell has fostered interdisciplinary collaboration across computer science, psychology, linguistics, and education. Her ALMAnaCH research group at INRIA Paris and her continued work at CMU focus on advancing socially interactive agents, with particular attention to their applications in education and their ability to model and support human social interaction. Her leadership extends to the French governmental committee CNNUM (Conseil National du Numérique), where she contributes expertise on the future of digital technology.
