Christine L. Lisetti

Keywords of research areas:

Affective Social Computing, Embodied Conversational Agents, Emotion Modeling

Research interests:

We are interested in research on affect, emotion, and personality at the intersection of research in Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, and Human-Robot Interaction. Emotional systems in humans influence important cognitive processes such as salience determination, focus and attention, priority determination, interruption in emergency situation, memorization and recall, goal generation, goal attribution, categorization, and preference. All these processes are important for intelligent systems with limited resources evolving in an unpredictable environment, including artificial ones (W. Clancey; N. Frijda; M. Minsky, D. Norman, A. Ortony, R. Picard, D. Rumelhart, H. Simon; A. Sloman; R. Zajonc).

We currently focus on two aspects of the role of emotions in (1) communication (human-computer interaction, and computer-mediated communication); (2) decision-making, and our research therefore involves:

1. Designing and developing computer systems and interfaces with increased “awareness” of their user's states and communication patterns and with “expressive abilities” that can render interaction more natural. Even though there exists a multitude of applications where human affect would gain to be acknowledged and responded to, we currently specialize on health and training. As our ideas progress, we will explore other applications.
2. Studying and importing some of the important functions of human emotions and social interactions to the development of artificially intelligent systems, both software agents and robots: Indeed, pure reasoning and logic have proven to be insufficient to account for true intelligence in real life situations, in which there simply is no time to determine which action to take out of an infinite number of possible ones, given a set of premises.
3. Evaluating our systems and intelligent user interfaces concurrently as we design them to ensure that the technologies of the future are truly accepted and enhance human lives.