Ian Steenstra
PhD Student
Research interests
- Artificial intelligence
- Human-computer interaction
- Natural language processing
- Affective computing
Education
- BS in Computer and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Biography
Ian Steenstra is a PhD student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He earned his bachelor’s in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is affiliated with the Relational Agents Group.
His research area is human-computer interaction, and he is interested in the combination of Embodied Conversational Agents and Affective Computing to provide emotionally aware conversations with patients for medical-related tasks. His faculty advisor is Dr. Timothy Bickmore.
Outside of work, Steenstra enjoys painting, playing video games, cooking, sailing, and advocating for mental health awareness.
Recent publications
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Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations
Citation: Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2025). Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations CoRR, abs/2502.18673. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.18673 -
Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents
Citation: Mehdi Arjmand, Farnaz Nouraei, Ian Steenstra, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2024). Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents CoRR, abs/2407.01824. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.01824 -
Engaging and Entertaining Adolescents in Health Education Using LLM-Generated Fantasy Narrative Games and Virtual Agents
Citation: Ian Steenstra, Prasanth Murali, Rebecca B. Perkins, Natalie Joseph, Michael K. Paasche-Orlow, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2024). Engaging and Entertaining Adolescents in Health Education Using LLM-Generated Fantasy Narrative Games and Virtual Agents CHI Extended Abstracts, 126:1-126:8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650983
