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.

I’m currently growing the ACHAI (Affective Computing and Human-AI Interaction) Lab at SFU, where my students investigate the factors shaping how people behave and interact with increasingly personal and socially capable AI systems, and develop AI technologies that can have a positive impact on society. I’m a proud member of Women in CS communities and an advocate for Open Science and Open-Source Software.