Modelling Socio-Emotional Embodied Conversational Agent

When: Monday, September 19, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Catherine Pelachaud, Telecom ParisTech

Host: Prof. Zhigang Deng

In this talk I will present our current work toward endowing virtual agents with socio-emotional capabilities. By applying different methodologies, based on corpus analysis, user-centered, or motion capture, we have enriched the agent’s palette of multimodal behaviors. We have conducted various studies to simulate communicative behaviors, emotional behaviors, social attitudes and behavior expressivity. Through its behaviors patterns, the agent can communicate with different social attitudes; its relationship towards its interlocutors influence how it behaves and places itself while conversing with them.

Bio:

Catherine Pelachaud is a Director of Research at CNRS in the laboratory LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech. Her research interest includes embodied conversational agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, and gesture), expressive behaviors and socio-emotional agents. She is associate editors of several journals among which IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems and Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. She has co-edited several books on virtual agents and emotion-oriented systems. She is recipient of the ACM – SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award 2015.