Shannon Gray DREU

My mentor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is Justine Cassell.

Justine Cassell (Ph.D., University of Chicago) has joined the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as Director. Cassell comes to CMU from Northwestern, where she was the founding director of the Technology and Social Behavior joint PhD in Communication and Computer Science, and of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. Before Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured faculty member at the MIT Media Lab, 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 ECA can play in children's lives, as a part of a Story Listening System, an interactive support for learning language and literacy skills.