Justine Cassell AT&T Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Laboratory Justine Cassell and her students in the Media Laboratory's Gesture and Narrative Language group create tools to enable natural forms of communication and linguistic expression in the digital world. Cassell applied ten years of research on the verbal and nonverbal aspects of human conversation to the design of the first autonomous animated agent with speech, gesture, intonation and facial expression. Her group is currently implementing the newest generation of an embodied conversational agent. Cassell also investigates the role that technologies such as these play in children's lives, as support for the learning of language, cognition, and social skills. She is the co-editor, with Henry Jenkins, of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1998) and the editor of Embodied Conversational Agents (2000). She holds a master's degree in literature from the Universite de Besancon (France), a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double PhD from the University of Chicago, in psychology and linguistics. Back to the Full Schedule.