Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS-ISIR) is Director of Research in the laboratory ISIR, Sorbonne University. Her research interest includes socially interactive agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, gesture and touch), and adaptive mechanisms in interaction. With her research team, she has been developing an interactive virtual agent platform, Greta, that can display emotional and communicative behaviors. She is co-editor of the ACM handbook on socially interactive agents (2021-22).
About the keynote talk:
In this talk I will present our effort in building Socially Interactive Agent SIA able to interact verbally and nonverbally with human interlocutors. Over the years, we have been working in endowing SIA with the capacity to display a wide range of communicative behaviors. In particular, we have looked at metaphoric gestures. As partner of an interaction, SIA should be able to adapt its multimodal behaviors and conversational strategies to optimize the engagement of its human interlocutors. To this aim, we have developed several adaptation mechanisms where the SIA can adapt its conversational strategies or its multimodal behaviors.