Invited Talk by Justine Cassell

Why You Have a Body and What it's Used for

In the past ten years there has been increasing interest in the role played by the body in discourse and dialogue. In this talk, I describe a series of explorations into the conversational functions of hand gestures, eye gaze, head movement and posture. These explorations reveal the diverse ways that body behaviors contribute to dialogue---they offer interlocutors important resources for describing the world, for showing their understanding of each other, and even for establishing a sense of mutual rapport. Each exploration also leads to an implemented dialogue agent that generates natural language paired appropriately with the nonverbal behavior.

Justine Cassell is a full professor at Northwestern University in the departments of Computer Science and Communication Studies, and director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Technology and Social Behavior.