I am an Assistant Professor at SIAT, SFU, working on Social and Affective computing. My research centers around understanding human behavior using AI principles. I draw on my interdisciplinary background of Cognitive Science, AI and Human-Computer Interaction, to develop a rigorous research methodology that allows me to build complex systems from individual components. My work balances quantitative research and applied AI methods, to gain a deeper understanding of human behavior via modeling them in theoretically grounded interactive systems. As a researcher, I focus on these issues by modeling high-level human behaviors such as empathy, personality and emotional dynamics from parameterized expressions such as bodily and facial gestures and speech. By creating biologically grounded models of these complex behaviors, my research aims to develop better interactive systems that can understand human experience and advance our understanding of human cognition by providing us means to evaluate our assumptions in a systematic and controlled environment.

My previous research focused on modeling empathic behavior in interactive virtual agents. The resulting framework, M-PATH, has been used for interacting with students during psychological evaluations as well as interactions with older adults. Following this, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of British Columbia, to extend the applicability of my socio-emotional models and interactive agents in an online learning scenario. As side-projects, I am also working on achieving computational abstraction techniques for anonymization without losing emotional content, and continuing to collaborate on our embodied conversational agents project with my colleagues.