JR Summit
The Junior Summit 1998 brought together 3000 young people from 139 countries, and was one of the first on-line communities of its kind.
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In our research on the Junior Summit, we are examining the over 48,000 messages exchanged among these children and adolescents, but also interviews and questionnaires concerning the effects of the Junior Summit that we collected five years later. We explore how language use and online community formation, leadership, and group dynamics. We also examine the design of this technology, and implications for educational technology, youth empowerment, civic engagement and political participation. Click here to learn more.
JR Summit Project Team
Justine Cassell
Brooke Foucault
Dona Tversky
Alastair Gill
Alex Markov
NUMACK
NUMACK (Northwestern University Multimodal Autonomous Conversational Kiosk) is an Embodied Conversation Agent (ECA) who gives directions around Northwestern's Campus using a combination of speech, gestures and facial expressions. Click here for publications. 
The system is capable of interacting with human users by generating novel language and gestures in coordination using a grammar-based, computational model of language and a gesture planning system. These systems work in coordination to express information about the real world from a domain knowledge base and an evolving model of context, or information state. Click here to learn more.
NUMACK Project Team
Justine Cassell
Rachel Baker
Paul Tepper
John Borland
Nathan Cantelmo
Virtual Peers
The Virtual Peers project consists of three sub-projects. Click here for publications.
Innovative Technologies For Autism
A special interest at the ArticuLab is to understand how children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) communicate with their peers. Successful peer interactions are vital to learning, future employment and well-being. Furthermore, while social interaction is a core deficit in autism, assessing and treating social deficits is not well understood. To address these needs, we use a unique paradigm of human-computer interaction, called virtual peers, to promote a better understanding of the verbal and non-verbal communication skills of children with ASD, their assessment and the individualized design of interventions. Click here to learn more.
Alex: Culturally Authentic Virtual Peer
Our research goal is to design culturally authentic agents that bridge the gap between language skills practiced outside the classroom setting and those language skills required in the classroom for diverse student populations. As designers of effective learning environments, we propose that pedagogical agents should be designed to reflect authentic portrayals of ethnic groups. We argue that ethnicity includes more than physical appearance but encompasses verbal and nonverbal behaviors as well. To reach this goal, we observe verbal and nonverbal discourse behaviors of African American preschool children as they participate in the learning activity of storytelling. We extend an existing Story Listening System to feature an embodied conversational agent named Alex that models the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Click here to learn more.
Collaborative storytelling with a virtual peer
This project investigates the potential of a virtual peer to engage in collaborative storytelling by modeling roles,
speech acts and turn-taking behaviors that children use during
improvisational play. We are investigating aspects of engagement and
educational potential of the collaborative system. Click here to learn more.
Virtual Peers Project Team
Justine Cassell
Andrea Tartaro
Kathleen Geraghty
Alberto Gonzalez
Katy Witmer
Kyrsten Brown
Angelica Cleveland
Maria Omar
Evelyn Parks
Elonna Pervos
Shruti Desai
Jason Okonofua