HCII ~ School of Computer Science ~ Carnegie Mellon University
JR Summit
The Junior Summit 1998 brought together 3000 young people from 139 countries, and was one of the first on-line communities of its kind.
Click here for publications.
In our research on the Junior Summit, we are examining the over 48,000 messages exchanged among these children and adolescents, but also interviews and questionnaires concerning the effects of the Junior Summit that we collected five years later. We explore how language use and online community formation, leadership, and group dynamics. We also examine the design of this technology, and implications for educational technology, youth empowerment, civic engagement and political participation. Click here to learn more.
JR Summit Project Team
Justine Cassell
Dona Tversky
Brooke Foucault
Alastair Gill
Alex Markov
NUMACK
NUMACK (Northwestern University Multimodal Autonomous Conversational Kiosk) is an Embodied Conversation Agent (ECA) who gives directions around Northwestern's Campus using a combination of speech, gestures and facial expressions. Click here for publications. 
The system is capable of interacting with human users by generating novel language and gestures in coordination using a grammar-based, computational model of language and a gesture planning system. These systems work in coordination to express information about the real world from a domain knowledge base and an evolving model of context, or information state. Click here to learn more.
NUMACK Project Team
Justine Cassell
Paul Tepper
Rachel Baker
John Borland
Nathan Cantelmo
Virtual Peers
The Virtual Peers project consists of three sub-projects. Click here for publications.
Innovative Technologies For Autism
A special interest at the ArticuLab is to understand how children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) communicate with their peers. Successful peer interactions are vital to learning, future employment and well-being. Furthermore, while social interaction is a core deficit in autism, assessing and treating social deficits is not well understood. To address these needs, we use a unique paradigm of human-computer interaction, called virtual peers, to promote a better understanding of the verbal and non-verbal communication skills of children with ASD, their assessment and the individualized design of interventions. Click here to learn more.
Enculturated virtual peers in inquiry-based
science contexts / Bridging the Achievement Gap with Authorable Virtual
Peers
The current focus of our Virtual Peers project, Alex
is an ethnicity- and gender-ambiguous character designed to help
children bridge the culture gap between "school English" and language
used by diverse student populations in daily life. An embodied
conversational agent, Alex models the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that African American children use with each other in interaction. Since Alex
uses elements of both African American English (AAE) and Mainstream
American English (MAE), children develop awareness of the appropriate
social context and use of science talk for peer and classroom settings. Click here to learn more.
Collaborative storytelling with a virtual peer
This project investigates the potential of a virtual peer to engage in collaborative storytelling by modeling roles, speech acts and turn-taking behaviors that children use during improvisational play. We are investigating aspects of engagement and educational potential of the collaborative system. Click here to learn more.
Virtual Peers Project Team
Justine Cassell
Margaret Echelbarger
Andrea Tartaro
Maria Omar
Katy Witmer
Kyrsten Brown
Shruti Desai
Kathleen Geraghty
Alberto Gonzalez
Jason Okonofua
Evelyn Parks
Elonna Pervos