I am interested in creating Interactive machines that utilize human-like Natural Language capabilities to engage and support users in a variety of everyday activities.
My research focuses on Conversational Agents that can interact with human users via natural language conversation to facilitate/support interactive activities. (Papers)
As an application domain, I have applied Conversational Agents as Intelligent Tutors that provide instructional support to students in ill-defined learning domains like Mechanical Engineering. We have conducted a series of experiments over the last five years to investigate Interactive Behaviors that Conversational Agents can perform in order to continually improve the support they provide to students.
Most recently my dissertation research focused on Socially-Capable Conversational Agents for Multi-Party Interactive Situations. I worked with Carolyn P. Rosé, Alan W. Black, Ian R. Lane and Jason D. Williams on this line of research. As an application domain, I worked on Collaborative Learning where two or more students are learning together. Recent results have shown that agents equipped with social interaction capabilities can lead to better learning outcomes.
In the past i have worked on aspects of Natural Language Interactions including Authoring Tools, Spoken Dialog Systems, Modeling Human Emotions and Speech Synthesis (Text-to-Speech).