Justine Cassell

Justine Cassell served as a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University, with additional appointments in Communication Studies and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She earned a dual Ph.D. in Linguistics and Developmental/Cognitive Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1991, an M.Litt. in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Linguistics from Dartmouth College, and a DEUG in Literature from Université de Besançon. Previously, she held a tenured position at the MIT Media Lab, where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. At Northwestern, Cassell founded and directed the Center for Technology and Social Behavior and established the joint Ph.D. program in Technology and Social Behavior between the Communication and Computer Science departments.

Cassell's research focuses on embodied conversational agents, multimodal interfaces, dialogue systems, and virtual peers. She developed the Embodied Conversational Agent, a virtual human capable of interacting through language and nonverbal behavior, and explored its applications as virtual peers to support children's literacy learning, cultural identity for non-mainstream English speakers, and social skills for children with high-functioning autism. She also examined the linguistic and psychological impacts of online communities on youth self-esteem, self-efficacy, and agency, including analysis of the Junior Summit online forum with over 3,000 participants from 139 countries. Key publications include Embodied Conversational Agents (MIT Press, 2000), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (MIT Press, 1998; 1,621 citations), "Beat: the behavior expression animation toolkit" (2001; 1,264 citations), "Animated conversation: rule-based generation of facial expression, gesture & spoken intonation for multiple conversational agents" (1994; 1,002 citations), and "Relational agents: a model and implementation of building user trust" (2001; 784 citations). Her scholarship has garnered over 24,000 citations. Awards include ACM Fellow (2016), AAAS Fellow (2012), Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellow (2016), Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Leadership (2008), MIT Edgerton Prize (2001), and Henry and Bryna David Prize (2018).