Justine M. Cassell (born March 19, 1960) is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the

Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie may refer to: People * Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name * Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie *Carnegie Building (Troy, New York), on the campus of Rensselaer Polyt ...

( HCII) and the

Language Technologies Institute The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is a research institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, and focuses on the area of language technologies. The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary scho ...

, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition.Cassell joins Human Computer Interaction Institute

Pittsburgh Business Times American City Business Journals, Inc. (ACBJ) is an American newspaper publisher based in Charlotte, North Carolina. ACBJ publishes The Business Journals, which contains local business news for 44 markets in the United States, Hemmings Motor News ...

, April 6, 2010.

Early life and education

Justine Cassell was born in

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and attended

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's Saint Ann's School. She holds a DEUG in Lettres Modernes from the Université de Besançon (1981), a BA in Comparative Literature/Linguistics from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

(1982), an M.LITT. in Linguistics from the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

(1986), and a double PhD in Linguistics and Developmental/Cognitive Psychology from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

(1991) where she studied under

David McNeill Glenn David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States) is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accomp ...

Career

As a tenured professor, Cassell was the director of the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

. After leaving MIT, she became a full professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Communication Studies at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

. There she was the founding director of Technology and Social Behavior Ph.D. program, and the interdisciplinary Center for Technology and Social Behavior. In 2001, Cassell received the Edgerton Faculty Award at MIT; in 2008 she received the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Leadership; in 2009 Cassell was made an ACM Distinguished Lecturer. Cassell has authored more than 100 journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters on these topics; she has given more than 50 keynote addresses at various conferences. In March 2016 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in recognition of her contributions to computer science and to human-computer interaction. Cassell's early work involved verbal and nonverbal aspects of human communication, into which she began introducing computational systems in order to deconstruct the linguistic and nonverbal communication to allow machines to interact with humans. Randal Bryant, Dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, commented on her appointment to the directorship of the Human Computer Interaction Institute that she would "expand the horizons of the institute." The Institute studies how people communicate with and through technology. Cassell has done work on "animated conversation," designing a human figure animation that integrates gesture, intonation, and facial expression.Justine Cassell's description of her work at Public Broadcasting System web site, undated
She helped design a web-based storytelling system called "Renga, the Cyberstory" to help draw girls into new technology. During 1994-1995 she designed and coordinated workshops on survival skills for women in academia at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

and the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

Summer Institute in Linguistics. She also has worked on research into what constitutes a "normal" career path in linguistics for women. A New York Times reviewer described the book ''From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games'' (written with Henry Jenkins) as an "academic anthology about what women, or rather girls, want from computer games." He writes that they "wisely" ask "why there have to be 'girl games' at all. After all, many games with tremendous appeal to women have no gender affiliation." She has commented frequently in media on topics related to girls and children and toys and technology. Cassell has opined that "The Internet is not diminishing community activity, but simply transferring it to online communities. Young people who use them are getting just as much practice in leadership and social skills and community involvement as they did before the Internet." Commenting on why women were not more involved in computing careers, Cassell has commented that the creation of girls' games had not eliminated "the sense among both boys and girls that computers were 'boys' toys' and that true girls didn't play with computers." Additionally, she has written that women do not want to be identified as a "nerd" or "geek." Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human which can interact with humans using language and gestures. The "virtual child" she created has helped children with autism develop advanced social skills not taught by association with real children or teachers. Cassell contributed to a 2011 New York Times debate on "Where Are the Women in Wikipedia?" writing: "...Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one's voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the 'talk page' of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of 'edit-warring' — where successive editors try to cancel each other's contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view...However, it is still the case in American society that debate, contention, and vigorous defense of one's position is often still seen as a male stance, and women's use of these speech styles can call forth negative evaluations." In 2017, she became a

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

Affiliations

Justine Cassell is affiliated with the following organizations: *

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...

Society for Research in Child Development The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is a professional society for the field of human development, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership o ...

Bibliography

*''Gesture and the dynamic dimension of language: essays in honor of David McNeill'', with David McNeill, Susan D. Duncan, Elena Terry Levy, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007 *''Embodied Conversational Agents'', MIT Press, 2000. First book ever published describing embodied conversational agents. *''From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games'', MIT Press, 1998.

References

External links