Timothy W. Bickmore

Timothy Bickmore, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
202 West Village H
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115

Office: 448 West Village H

(617) 373-5477
email: bickmore at ccs.neu.edu

Research Overview

I'm interested in the development and study of Relational Agents, which are computer agents designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with people. In order to use the same myriad cues that people use when relating to each other, I build agents that are capable of emulating face-to-face interaction with people, including the use of hand gestures, facial expressions, and body posture, in addition to speech.

These agents are particularly effective for tasks in which long-term interactions and personal relationships are known to be important, such as in education, sales and marketing, and the helping professions. Of these, I have focused my recent work within the healthcare domain on health education and health behavior change applications. In order to accomplish this, I conduct communication studies of health provider-patient interactions, develop new approaches to dialogue planning that can address both the behavioral intervention and social aspects of the interactions, and develop animated agents that can use appropriate nonverbal behavior in their simulated conversations with patients, as well as conduct clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of the resulting systems.

More on Relational Agents

Relational Agents Group