Justine Cassell

Justine Cassell is jointly appointed as Dean's Professor of Language Technologies in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Researcher at Inria Paris where she also holds a chair in the PRAIRIE Paris institute on interdisciplinary research in AI. Previously Cassell was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Doctoral Program and Research Center, and before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell has received the MIT Edgerton Prize, Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award, the AAMAS Test of Time paper award, and the National Academy of Sciences Henry and Bryna David Prize. She is a fellow of the AAAS, the Royal Academy of Scotland, and the ACM, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University. With doctoral degrees in linguistics and developmental psychology, Cassell led the team that built the very first embodied conversational agent, and is also credited with developing the virtual peer, a child-like AI that has demonstrated successful scaffolding of children’s literacy and science learning, as well as social skills. Cassell is a co-founder of EqualAI, a non-profit working on reducing bias in AI by leading the movement for innovative, responsible, and inclusive  artificial intelligence. In 2021, Cassell was named a member of the French governmental commission le CNNUM (Conseil National du Numérique) — the Council on the Future of Digital in France. She has been invited to speak about Artificial Intelligence at the World Economic Forum in Davos for 9 years.