![\"Justine_Cassell\"](\"https:\/\/www.justinecassell.com\/articulab\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Justine_Cassell.jpg\")
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Justine Cassell (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a senior researcher in the ALMAnaCH<\/a> NLP group at Inria Paris<\/a>,\u00a0the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, with a chair at\u00a0PR[AI]RIE<\/a>, the Paris Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She maintains an affiliation with Carnegie Mellon University\u00a0 where she was formerly Associate Dean for Technology Strategy and Impact in the School of Computer Science<\/a>, co-founder of the Simon Initiative<\/a> for Technology-Enhanced Learning, co-director (with Tom Mitchell) of InMind<\/a>, the Project on the future of digital assistants,\u00a0 and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.\u00a0<\/a>She held courtesy appointments in Linguistics<\/a>, Psychology<\/a>, and the CNBC<\/a> Center for the Neural Bases of Cognition. Cassell came to CMU from Northwestern, where she was the founding director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior<\/a>\u00a0and its affiliated joint PhD in Communication and Computer Science. Before Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured faculty member at the MIT Media Lab<\/a>, where she headed the Gesture and Narrative Language research group. Cassell’s research focuses on understanding natural forms of communication, and then creating technological tools for those forms of communication and linguistic expression to flourish in the digital world. In particular, she is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior. More recently Cassell has investigated the role that the virtual peer<\/em> (a child-sized version of the Embodied Conversational Agent)\u00a0can play in children’s lives, and has demonstrated that the virtual peer can play an important role in scaffolding children’s healthy development and learning, particularly for those children in under-resourced schools.<\/p>\n