Timothy Bickmore - Faculty Profile

I'm interested in building computer agents that help people through health behavior change and chronic disease self management interventions, and that assist in health education. I believe the best way to go about doing this is by emulating the best role models we have — human health providers — with as much fidelity as possible, including all of the verbal and nonverbal behavior that occurs in a typical face-to-face interaction between providers and their patients. I have a particular interest in modeling the social and affective aspects of these interactions, both because they are particularly crucial in long-term interventions and because computer systems to date have failed to address them adequately.

In order to accomplish this, I conduct communication studies of provider-patient interactions (or use animated agents as "standardized patients" in these studies), develop new approaches to dialogue planning that can address both the behavioral intervention and social aspects of the interactions, and develop animated agents that can use appropriate nonverbal behavior in their simulated conversations with patients ("embodied conversational agents"), as well as conduct clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of the resulting systems.