CURRICULUM VITAE

TIMOTHY BICKMORE

OFFICE

College of Computer and Information Science

Northeastern University

202 West Village H

360 Huntington Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

(617) 373-5477

INTERNET

bickmore@ccs.neu.edu

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/

EDUCATION	MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Cambridge, MA
	Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences, February 2003 Thesis: Relational Agents: Effecting Change Through Human-Computer Relationships. Presents a theory, computational model, and evaluation of how animated conversational agents can build relationships with users, and the effects these relationships can have on task outcomes in sales, tutoring and health behavior change applications. Coursework includes: Affective Computing, Discourse and Dialogue for Interactive Systems, Social Visualization, Society of Mind, Systems and Self, Social Psychology, Interaction Techniques for Virtual Environments, Technology and Competitive Strategy (co-taught by MIT and Harvard Business School), and Social Relationships (at Harvard). ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY Tempe, AZ Master of Science in Computer Science, June 1986 Bachelor of Science and Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering, June 1985 Summa Cum Laude
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE	NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY (2005-Present) Boston, MA Assistant Professor, College of Computer and Information Science: Investigates the development and evaluation of Relational Agents—computer artifacts designed to establish and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with users, and their use within health education and behavior change. BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE (2003-2005) Boston, MA Assistant Professor of Medicine: Investigates the development and impact of new technologies for health behavior change and chronic disease management, focusing on the use of automated systems that simulate face-to-face conversation with patients. Develops algorithms to support natural language dialogue that encompasses both therapeutic and social conversation. Conducts studies of interpersonal communication between health providers and patients--with particular emphasis on the relational and social aspects--to inform the development of these technologies, as well as studies to evaluate the use of these technologies in addressing a wide range of health problems in diverse populations. MIT MEDIA LABORATORY (1998-2003) Cambridge, MA Research Assistant, Affective Computing Group: Advisor: Rosalind Picard. Designed and developed an animated conversational exercise advisor agent designed to build long-term relationships with users in order to boost compliance in an exercise behavior change program. Conducted a one-month longitudinal study involving 100 participants who interacted with the agent daily. Research Assistant, Gesture & Narrative Language Group: Advisor: Justine Cassell. Designed and conducted several studies illuminating the role of nonverbal behavior in face-to-face conversation between humans and between humans and conversational computer agents, including user nonverbal behavior in PDA-based interactions, and posture shifts as markers of topic changes. Designed and conducted two studies on the role of social dialogue in building trust between a user and a conversational agent. Project lead on REA, a four-year effort to develop an embodied conversational agent in the form of a life-sized, animated real-estate agent, who interacts with users using speech, gesture, gaze, intonation and other nonverbal modalities. Co-developed the BEAT text-to-embodied-speech system. Technical lead on the initial build of SAM, an embodied conversational storyteller for children.

WORK EXPERIENCE	FUJI-XEROX PALO ALTO RESEARCH LAB (1995-1998) Palo Alto, CA Consulting Scientist: Project lead on the Office Avatars project, investigating the use of conversational agents as personal representatives and document annotations. Project lead on the Digestor project, investigating techniques for dynamically re-formatting web content for handheld devices. INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE ASSOCIATES (1994-1998) Sacramento, CA Principal: Independent contractor on several NASA and commercial advanced software development projects. Principal Investigator on two NASA Phase I SBIR contracts. Worked with customers through project definition, proposal writing, system design and development, evaluation and documentation. Customers included Lockheed Missiles & Space, Aerojet Industrial Products, Affordable Health Care, NASA LeRC, NASA MSFC, NASA Stennis, and Boeing Rocketdyne. AEROJET PROPULSION SYSTEMS (1990-1994) Sacramento, CA Project Engineer: Developed intelligent monitoring and diagnostic systems for liquid fuel rocket engines. Worked closely with NASA customers through entire development process from proposal writing to system design, implementation and evaluation. LOCKHEED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CENTER (1986-1990) Menlo Park, CA Research Scientist: Conducted software R&D for government and internal customers. Managed five-person knowledge-based software technology group. Conducted training seminars in AI software technology, including LISP, ART, KEE, CLIPS and knowledge engineering.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE	BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE Boston, MA Instructor, Introduction to Computer Applications in Healthcare and Biomedicine: Spring 2004. Graduate level survey course in medical informatics. Responsible for course design, homework and lab assignments, developing and giving over half of the lectures, and grading. MIT MEDIA LABORATORY Cambridge, MA Guest Lecturer, Human-Robot Interaction: Fall 2002. Instructor: Cynthia Breazeal. Gave lecture on applying theories from social psychology, linguistics and sociology to building relationships between people and computational artifacts. Teaching Assistant, Theory and Practice of Discourse and Dialogue for Interactive Systems: Fall 2000. Instructor: Justine Cassell. Gave two lectures (Discourse Theory and Social Dialogue) and taught parts of other classes. Prepared reading materials, lab assignments, and demonstrations and reviewed lab solutions. Graded all student materials. SACRAMENTO STATE UNIVERSITY Sacramento, CA Instructor, Extended Learning Program: 1995-1997. Taught semester-long courses on C++ and Java programming. Responsible for design of courses and materials, gave all lectures, supervised and graded lab work. NASA MSFC, NASA LeRC, LOCKHEED R&D, AEROJET, GTE LABS, KAISER HMO Instructor: 1988-1998. Taught 20 week-long professional seminars on Expert System Development, and Advanced LISP and Java programming. Responsible for design of courses and materials, gave all lectures, supervised and graded lab work.
PUBLICATIONS Dissertation	Most recent publications available online at: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/publications.html Bickmore, T. (2003) Relational Agents: Effecting Change Through Human-Computer Relationships, Ph.D. Thesis, MIT Media Arts & Sciences. Available at: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bickmore/bickmore-thesis.pdf
Journal Articles	Bickmore, T., Caruso, L., Clough-Gorr, K., and Heeren, T. (to appear) “’It’s just like you talk to a friend’ – Relational Agents for Older Adults” Interacting with Computers. Bickmore, T., Gruber, A., and Picard R. (to appear) "Establishing the Computer-Patient Working Alliance in Automated Health Behavior Change Interventions" Patient Education and Counseling. Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. (to appear) "Establishing and Maintaining Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships" ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (ToCHI). Bickmore, T. (2004) "Unspoken Rules of Spoken Interaction" Communications of the ACM 47(4): 38-44. Cassell, J., Bickmore, T. (2002) "Negotiated Collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents" User Modeling and User Adaptive Interaction 13(1): 89-132. Cassell, J. and Bickmore, T. (2001) “External Manifestations of Trustworthiness in the Interface”, Communications of the ACM 43(12): 50-56. Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Vilhjalmsson, H., Yan, H. (2001) "More Than Just a Pretty Face: Conversational Protocols and the Affordances of Embodiment." Knowledge-Based Systems 14: 55-64. Bickmore, T. and Girgensohn, A. (1999) "Web Page Filtering and Re-Authoring for Mobile Users", Computer Journal special issue on Mobile Computing 42(6): 534-546. Bickmore, T. and Schilit, B. (1997) "Digestor: Device-Independent Access to the World Wide Web", Computer Networks And ISDN Systems, 29(8-13): 1075-1082, September. Bickmore, T. and Filman, R. (1997) "MultiLex, A Pipelined Lexical Analyzer." Software Practice and Experience 27(1): 25-32. Findler, N. and Bickmore, T. (1996) "On the concept of causality and a causal modeling system for scientific and engineering domains, CAMUS." Applied Artificial Intelligence, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 455-487. Findler, N., Bickmore, T., Ihrig, L. and Tsang, W. (1991) "A note on the comparison of five heuristic optimization techniques of a certain class of decision trees." Information Sciences, vol. 53, no. 1-2, pp. 89-100. Vere, S. and Bickmore, T. (1990) "A Basic Agent." Computational Intelligence 6:41-60. Cook, L. and Bickmore, T. (1989) "Instructional Strategies for Teaching Knowledge Engineering." Heuristics, Vol. 2, No. 3, Fall, pp. 24-28. Findler, N., Cromp, R. and Bickmore, T. (1985) "A General-Purpose Man-Machine Environment with Special Reference to Air Traffic Control." International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 23, pp.587-603.
PUBLICATIONS Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers PUBLICATIONS Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers Continued	Bickmore, T., Caruso, L., and Clough-Gorr, K. (2005) “Acceptance and Usability of a Relational Agent Interface by Urban Older Adults” Proceedings of of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Portland, OR. Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. (2004) “Towards Caring Machines” Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Vienna. Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. (2003). "Subtle Expressivity by Relational Agents." Proceedings of the CHI 2003 Workshop on Subtle Expressivity for Characters and Robots. April 7^th, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. (2002) "Phone vs. Face-to-Face with Virtual Persons." Proceedings of the International CLASS Workshop on Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue Systems. June 28-29, Copenhagen, Denmark. Bickmore, T. (2002) "Social Dialogue is Serious Business." Proceedings of the CHI 2002 Workshop on Socially Adept Technologies, April 21, Minneapolis, MN. Cassell, J., Nakano, Y., Bickmore, T., Sidner, C., Rich, C. (2001). “Non-Verbal Cues for Discourse Structure.” Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 106-115. July 17-19, Toulouse, France Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H., Bickmore, T.(2001) "BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit." Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '01, pp. 477-486. August 12-17, Los Angeles, CA. Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. (2001) "Relational Agents: A Model and Implementation of Building User Trust". Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 396-403. March 31-April 5, Seattle, Washington Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Vilhjálmsson, H., and Yan, H. (2000) "More Than Just a Pretty Face: Affordances of Embodiment" in Proceedings of the Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 52-59. January 4-9, New Orleans, LA. Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. (2000) "How about this weather? Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents." in Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Socially Intelligent Agents. pp. 4-8. November 3-5, Cape Cod, MA. Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Billinghurst, M., Campbell, L., Chang, K., Vilhjálmsson, H. and Yan, H. (1999). "Embodiment in Conversational Interfaces: Rea." Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 520-527. Pittsburgh, PA. Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. (1999) "Small Talk and Conversational Storytelling In Embodied Interface Agents," Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Narrative Intelligence. Bickmore, T., Cook, L., Churchill, E., and Sullivan, J. (1998) "Animated Autonomous Personal Representatives." Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents. Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Billinghurst, M., Campbell, L., Chang, K., Vilhjálmsson, H., Yan, H.(1998) "An Architecture for Embodied Conversational Characters." Proceedings of the First Workshop on Embodied Conversational Characters, pp. 21-30, Tahoe City, CA. Churchill, E., Prevost, S., Bickmore, T., Hodgson, P. and Cook, L. (1998) "Design Issues for Embodied Conversational Characters", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Embodied Conversational Characters, pp. 149-158, Tahoe City, CA. Prevost, S., Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J. (1998) "Interactional Competency for Conversational Characters." Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Representations for Multi-Modal Human-Computer Interaction. Bickmore, T. and Schilit, W. (1997) "Digestor: Device-Independent Access to the World-Wide Web." Proceedings Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, Santa Clara, California, April. Bickford, R., Bickmore, T., Meyer, C. and Zakrasjek, J. (1996) "Real-Time Flight Data Validation for Rocket Engines." Proceedings 32nd Joint Conference on Propulsion, Orlando, Florida, July, 1996. Gray, R., Bickmore, T. and Williams, S. (1995) "Reengineering COBOL Systems to Ada." Proceedings 1995 Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, April, 1995. Bickmore, T. "Sensor Validation." (1994) Proceedings 1994 Conference on Advanced Earth-to-Orbit Propulsion Technology, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama. Pollack, W., Nelson, L., and Bickmore, T. (1995) "Converting Hierarchical Database Systems to Relational." Proceedings 1995 Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, April, 1995. Jansa, E., Bickmore, T., Makel, D., Powers, W. (1993) "Automated Hydrogen Propellant Leak Detection." Proceedings Fifth Annual Space System Health Management Technology Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, April, 1993. Bickmore, T. and Maul, W. (1993) "A Qualitative Approach to Systemic Diagnosis of the SSME." AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference and Exhibition, Reno, Nevada. Bickmore, T. and Bickford, T. (1992) "Aerojet's Titan Health Assessment Expert System." 28th Joint Conference on Propulsion, Nashville, Tennessee. Bickmore, T. (1992) "A Probabilistic Approach to Sensor Data Validation." 28th Joint Conference on Propulsion, Nashville, Tennessee. Cook, L., Hinkle, D., and Bickmore, T. (1990) "Planning for the manufacturing domain: long-term and reactive scheduling." First International Conference on Expert Planning Systems, pp. 6-10. Cook, L. and Bickmore, T. (1990) "Towards Better Expert Systems Curricula: Lessons Learned from Industry." Proceedings of the California State University Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Cook, L. and Bickmore, T. (1989) "An Automatable Model of Knowledge Acquisition." Proceedings of the Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Detroit, Michigan. Bickmore, T. (1989) "An Object-Oriented Approach to Tactical Text Generation ." Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Applications of Artificial Intelligence VII, Orlando, Florida. Bickmore, T. and Yoshimoto, G. (1987) "An Evidential Approach to Model-Based Satellite Diagnosis." Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Space Station Automation III, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Findler, N., Bickmore, T., and Belofsky, M. (1983) "On Some Issues Concerning Optimization and Decision Trees." Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematical Modeling, Zurich, Switzerland.
PUBLICATIONS Conference Short Papers And Abstracts	Bickmore, T. (to appear) “Affecting Health Behavior through Parasocial Involvement with Interactive Computer Characters” IARR Mini-Conference on Exploring Relationship in Health or Health of Relationships, Indianapolis, IN. Bickmore, T. (to appear) “Relational Agents for Patient Education and Counseling” 2005 International Conference on Communication in Healthcare, Chicago, IL. Bickmore, T. (2005) “Behavioral Informatics: a Perspective from Informatics” Society for Behavioral Medicine 2005 Annual Meeting, Boston, MA. Bickmore, T. (2005) “Conversational Health Assessment” CHI’05 Workshop on HCI Challenges in Health Assessment, Portland, OR. Bickmore, T. (2004) “Connecting Elders to Home-based Care-giving Agents” CHI ’04 Workshop on Home Technologies to Keep Elders Connected, Vienna. Bickmore, T. (2004) “Relational Agents for Home-based Elder Care” CHI ’04 Workshop on HCI and Homecare: Connecting Families and Clinicians, Vienna. Bickmore, T. (2004) "What do you Expect? Towards a Model of Human-Computer Relationships," Vienna Workshop on Dimensions of Sociality: Shaping Relationships with Machines, November 19-20, Vienna. Bickmore T. and Giorgino, T. (2004) "Some Novel Aspects of Health Communication from a Dialogue Systems Perspective," Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialogue Systems for Health Communication, October, 2004, Washington, DC. Bickmore, T. (2002). "When Etiquette Really Matters: Relational Agents and Behavior Change." Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Etiquette for Human-Computer Work, November 15-17, Falmouth, MA. Bickmore, T. (2002). "Towards the Design of Multimodal Interfaces for Handheld Conversational Characters." Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 788-789. April 20-25, Minneapolis, MN. Cassell, J., Stocky, T., Bickmore, T., Gao, Y., Nakano, Y., Ryokai, K., Tversky, D., Vaucelle, C., Vilhjálmsson, H. (2002). "MACK: Media lab Autonomous Conversational Kiosk." Proceedings of Imagina02. February 12-15, Monte Carlo. Cassell, J., Ananny, M., Basu, A., Bickmore, T., Chong, P., Mellis, D., Ryokai, K., Smith, J., Vilhjálmsson, H., Yan, H. (2000) "Shared Reality: Physical Collaboration with a Virtual Peer." Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 259-260. April 4-9, Amsterdam, NL. Bly, S., Cook, L., Bickmore, T., Churchill, E. and Sullivan, J. (1998) "The Rise of Personal Web Pages at Work." Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), ACM Press, pp. 313-314.
Book Chapters	Bickmore, T. and Picard, R. (in press) “Future of Caring Machines” in R. Bushko (ed.) Future of Health Technology, IOS Press. Tim Bickmore, Justine Cassell (in press) "Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents" In J. van Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjaer, and N. Bernsen (eds.), Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction with Multimodal Dialogue Systems. New York: Kluwer Academic. Cook, L., Bickmore, T., Bly, S., Churchill, E. and Prevost, S. (1999) "Autonomous Synthetic Computer Characters as Personal Representatives" in Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, K. Dautenhahn (Guest-editor). John Benjamins Publishing Company (In the Advances in Consciousness Research series). Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Campbell, L., Vilhjálmsson, H. and Yan, H. (1999) "Conversation as a System Framework: Designing Embodied Conversational Agents." In Embodied Conversational Agents, J. Cassell, S. Prevost, E. Churchill, and J. Sullivan (editors). MIT Press. Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H., Chang, K., Bickmore, T., Campbell, L. and Yan, H. (1999) "Requirements for an Architecture for Embodied Conversational Characters." Computer Animation and Simulation '99 (Eurographics Series). Vienna, Austria: Springer Verlag.
PATENTS	Bickmore, T., Schilit, W., Girgensohn, A., and Sullivan, J. (2005) Document re-authoring systems and methods for providing device-independent access to the world wide web, Fuji Xerox Co & Xerox Corp. US Patent 6,857,102 granted February 15, 2005. Prevost, S., Bickmore, T., Sullivan, J. Churchill, E., and Girgensohn, A. (2003) Method and apparatus for embodied conversational characters with multimodal input/output in an interface device , Fuji Xerox Co & Xerox Corp. US Patent 6,570,555 granted May 27, 2003. Bickmore, T., Sullivan, J., Churchill, E., Bly, S. and Cook, L. (2002) Method and Apparatus for Creating Personal Autonomous Avatars. Xerox Corporation. US Patent 6,466,213 granted October 15, 2002. Wilcox, L., Schilit, W., Sawhney, N., Sullivan, J. and Bickmore, T. (1998) System for capturing and retrieving audio data and corresponding hand-written notes. Xerox Corporation and Fuji Xerox Company, Ltd. U.S. Patent 5,970,455, Granted Oct. 19, 1999. International Patent granted in June 1998. Makel, D., Jansa, E., Cahill, D. and Bickmore, T. (1996) Remotely controllable LNG field station management system and method. U.S. Patent 5,586,050, Granted December 17th, 1996.
RESEARCH GRANTS	NIH/National Library of Medicine, "Just in Time Information for Exercise Adoption," $ 385,000. January 2005-January 2007. Boston University Department of Medicine Pilot Project Grant, “Impact of Relational Agent Technology on Exercise Adoption in an Older Adult Population.” $14,000. July 2003-December 2004.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES	Member American Association for Artificial Intelligence Member Association for Computing Machinery Member American Medical Informatics Association Member American Academy on Physician and Patient Member International Association for Relationship Research Co-Chair, 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium on Argumentation for Consumers of Healthcare Chair, 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Caring Machines: AI in Eldercare Chair, 2004 AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialogue Systems for Health Communication. Member of the Organizing Committee for the 2002 AAAI Fall Symposium on Etiquette for Human-Computer Work. Member of the Program Committee for the 2002 International CLASS Workshop on Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Guest editor for forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics on Dialog Systems for Health Communication. Reviewer for the following journals: AI Magazine Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Communications of the ACM Discourse Processes IEEE Internet Computing Magazine IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in BioMedicine IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering International Journal of Human-Computer Studies International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Patient Education & Counseling Reviewer for the following conferences: AISB Symposium on Mind-Minding Agents (2005) AISB Symposium on Conversational Informatics for Supporting Social Intelligence & Interaction (2005) Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (2003, 2004, 2005) ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)(2005) International Conference of Multimodal Interfaces (2004) PRICAI Workshop on Lifelike Animated Agents (2002) SIGGRAPH (2004) Workshop on Social and Emotional Intelligence in Learning Environments (2004)
AWARDS	Winning entry in the British Airways Concorde design competition held at the MIT Media Lab, entitled "Airborne Social Networking." The entry described ways in which technology could promote social networking among airline passengers. James Chen Annual Award for Best UMUAI Paper for “Negotiated Collusion” (2002).