Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series
Connection Machines: The Science and Engineering of Rapport
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Wednesday, February 15, 2012 Justine Cassell |
Abstract:
The field of HCI grew up at the intersection of Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology. As time has passed, however, the field has expanded to include insights from other social sciences, as well as from design and the arts. In doing so HCI has come to embrace "soft" issues of emotion, motivation, and social skills. However, it turns out that these soft constructs have hard-core effects on how we design computational artifacts, from learning systems to direction-giving devices. In this talk I will describe some work on the role of rapport-building in interactive systems, with a special focus on the ramifications for implementing online course delivery and other varieties of educational technologies.
Biography
Justine Cassell is the Charles M. Geschke Director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at CMU. Cassell was faculty in EECS and Communication Studies at Northwestern University from 2003 to 2010 where she was the founding director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior and the joint Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior. Before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell received the Edgerton Prize at MIT, is an ACM and CRA Distinguished Lecturer, was honored in 2008 with the "Women of Vision" award from the Anita Borg Institute, and in 2011 was named to the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Robotics and Smart Devices. She spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month ago on the promises and perils of online learning.
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