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Timothy Bickmore, Ph.D. Associate Professor Office: 177 Huntington Ave, Office 911 (stop 910-177) (617) 373-5477 |
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Research Overview I'm interested in the development and study of Relational Agents, which are computer agents designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with people. In order to use the same myriad cues that people use when relating to each other, I build agents that are capable of emulating face-to-face interaction with people, including the use of hand gestures, facial expressions, and body posture, in addition to speech. These agents are particularly effective for tasks in which long-term
interactions and personal relationships are known to be important, such as in
education, sales and marketing, and the helping professions. Of these, I have
focused my recent work within the healthcare domain on health education and
health behavior change applications. In order to accomplish this, I conduct
communication studies of health provider-patient interactions, develop new
approaches to dialogue planning that can address both the behavioral
intervention and social aspects of the interactions, and develop animated
agents that can use appropriate nonverbal behavior in their simulated conversations
with patients, as well as conduct clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of
the resulting systems.
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Courses
IS4800 Empirical Research
Methods in Information Science
CS5340 Human-Computer Interaction
IS4300 Human-Computer Interaction
Other Stuff
Old Web Page at the MIT Media Lab
AAAI Fall '04 Symposium on Dialogue Systems for Health Communication
AAAI Fall '05 Symposium on Caring Machine: AI in Eldercare
AAAI Spring '06 Symposium on Argumentation for Consumers of Healthcare
CHI '09 Workshop on Engagement by Design
SBM'11 Course on Towards Standardization and Reuse in Behavioral Informatics
IVA'14 Fourteenth International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents