
We develop and evaluate AI systems that operate meaningfully within context, across language, embodiment, and society, to support safer, fairer, and more collaborative human and machine interaction.
We study:
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Contextual language understanding
Discourse coherence, semantics, pragmatics, and conversational modeling -
Contextual interaction
Gesture, gaze, sign language, multimodal communication, and embodied AI -
Contextual evaluation
Human-in-the-loop methods, fairness-informed metrics, and socially grounded assessments -
Contextual deployment
Equity, access, and real world applications in healthcare, education, and policy

Kate Atwell, PhD Student
(She/Her)

Asteria Kaeberlein, PhD Student
(She/Her)

Mert Inan, PhD Student
(He/Him)

Saki Imai, PhD Student
(She/Her)

Past students and visitors

Anthony Sicilia, PhD Student
Assistant Professor, West Virginia University

Sabit Hassan
Scientist at UNESCO
MS Students
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Sanchayan Sarkar, MS project: Multimodal Turn-Taking in Human-Machine Dialogue, 2021.
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Christian Pensabene, MS project: The Representation and Processing of Singed Coreference in Discourse
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Kevin Hostler, MS Project: Discourse Coherence and Misinformation: A Multimodal Case Study
Undergraduate Students
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Joffin Manjaly, Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, Project Title: Political Ideology and Polarization of Policy Positions, 2022.
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Sadhana Sridhar, Graduate student of neuroscience at UCSF, Project Title: Dynamic evaluation of trust in NLP systems 2022..
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Urjeet Deshmukh, Amazon Alexa, Project Title: Lexical innovation in visual dialogue games, 2022.
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Katelyn Morrison, Ph.D. student at CMU, Project Title: Spatially Sensitive Learning Algorithm to Mitigate Discrimination in Resource Allocation, 2021.
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Nur Iren, Google, Project Title: Examining Covert Gender Bias in Machine Translation, 2021.
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Chloe Ciora, Google, Project Title: Examining Covert Gender Bias in Machine Translation, 2021.
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Daya Sharon, IBM, Project Title: Pronominal Reference Type Identification and Event Anaphora Resolution in American Sign Language, 2021.
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Christian Pensabene, MS student at Pitt, SCITalk: A Data2Text Converstinal System for Communicating about COVID Data, 2021.
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Michael Voit, Project Title: Multimodal Clarification Strategies in Conversational AI Systems, 2021.
Photo credit: 3D Visualization of Basal Ganglia: Subcortical Nuclei in Human Brain Controlling Motor and Cognitive Functions