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How did your interest in linguistics and psychology lead you
to work with technology and computers?
As
I began applying for jobs, I realized that the whole field
was full of boundaries. The interdisciplinary work that I
wanted to do wasn't going to be easy to find a home for. My
first job, at Penn State, I was faculty in three departments.
Linguistics, Psychology, and French. I knew that my interests
should have a home. So I applied to be visiting faculty at
University of Pennsylvania where I was in the Institute for
Research on Cognitive Science - which is interdisciplinary
to start with - and I was also in Computer Science for the
first time.
When I first came to MIT, I thought, "these people
are crazy."
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That
year, I planned to build computational models of the relationship
between speech and gesture. That would be a way of proving
to these different communities that what I was doing was really
science. The models that I wanted to build were virtual people
in whom I could fit my grammars of the relationships between
speech and gesture. I could test my hypothesis by building
one virtual human that ran one hypothesis and another virtual
human that ran another one, and then compare them.
I
had a group of graduate students whom I worked with to build
these virtual people, and three faculty with whom I collaborated.
We built the very first speaking and gesturing virtual human.
What is it like working at MIT's Media Lab?
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Cassell
and her students at MIT with some of thier creations,
REA, Beat (at left), Monster and Sam (at right).
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When
I first came here, I thought, "these people are crazy." I
remember somebody showing me a software program that could
take a photograph and find trees in it. And I thought, "What?
I could find trees." I just had no understanding of
the fields that went into this, and half the time I thought
they were pulling my leg. But, I found that there was lots
of overlap between what they were doing and what I was doing.
In children's learning, in narrative, in gesture, in language.
I was just blown away that finally, in one building, everything
I did could be housed.
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Photo:
MIT Media Lab
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