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DR. JUSTINE CASSELL
The ScienceDaily article
Children With Autism May Learn From "Virtual Peers" said
Using "virtual peers" — animated life-sized children that simulate
the
behaviors and conversation of typically developing children —
Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions
designed to prepare children with autism for interactions with real-life
children.
Justine Cassell, professor of communication studies and electrical
engineering and computer science, recently presented a preliminary study
on the work at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science.
"Children with high-functioning autism may be able to give you a lecture
on a topic of great interest to them but they can't carry on a
'contingent' — or two-way — conversation," said Cassell,
director of
Northwestern's Center for Technology and Social Behavior.
Justine Cassell, Ph.D. is the director of the new Center for
Technology & Social Behavior, and a full professor in the departments of
Communication Studies and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at
Northwestern University. She is also the graduate director of the new
Technology and Social Behavior joint PhD in Communication and Computer
Science. She previously held a tenured appointment at the MIT Media Lab
where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group.
She earned a master's degree in Literature from the Université de
Besançon
(France), a master's degree in Linguistics from the University of
Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago,
in Psychology and in Linguistics.
Justine's research interests originated in the study of human-human
conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in
allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This
new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements
of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to embody machines
with conversational, social and narrative intelligence so that they
could interact with humans in human-like ways. Increasingly, however,
her research has come to address the impact and benefits of technologies
such as these on learning and communication.
In particular, Justine is credited with developing the
Embodied
Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting
with
humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. More recently she
has investigated the role that the ECA can play in children's lives, as
a Story Listening System (SLS): peer support for learning language and
literacy skills. And she has also employed linguistic and
psychological analyses to look at the effects of online conversation
among a particularly diverse group of young people on their self-esteem,
self-efficacy, and sense of community.
Once machines have human-like capabilities, can they be used to evoke
the best communicative skills that humans are capable of, the richest
learning? This is the goal of her research: to develop
technologies that evoke from humans the most human and humane of our
capabilities, and to study their effects on our evolving
world.
Justine coedited
Embodied Conversational Agents,
From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer
Games, and
Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language: Essays in Honor of
David McNeill, and coauthored
From Quake Grrls to Desperate Housewives: A
Decade of Gender and Computer Games,
Playing with Virtual Peers: Bootstrapping Contingent Discourse in
Children with Autism,
Is it Self-Administration if the Computer Gives you Encouraging
Looks?,
"Hi Tech or High Risk? Moral Panics about Girls Online, and
Trading Spaces: How Humans and Humanoids use Speech and Gesture to
Give
Directions.
Read the
full list of her publications.
Learn about her
activism!
Read
GirlGeek of the Week and
Frontiers Profile: Justine Cassell.
Read some
Justine quotes.
Print bio!
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