Justine Cassell, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, will speak Friday, Feb. 11 on “Social Practice: Sociocultural Approaches to Identity and Culture in Embodied Conversational Agents.”
Cassell’s talk at 4:15 p.m. in the Nott Memorial is part of the Union College Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Lecture series.
The series is sponsored by the Skidmore Union Network, funded by Skidmore’s and Union’s NSF Advance grants.
Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting with people using both verbal and non-verbal behavior. She will discuss her work with children who speak several dialects of American English and the subsequent implementation and iterative evaluations of a virtual peer based on that research. The event is co-sponsored with the Department of Computer Science.
On March 9, Geraldine Richmond, professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, will speak at Skidmore as part of the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series. That event is being co-sponsored by the Skidmore Department of Chemistry.