Candace L. (Candy) Sidner has a long standing interest in
human communication and collaboration, and their
application to agents, robots, and interfaces, especially
those using gesture, social behavior, speech, and
natural language.
Candy is a Research Professor at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute, with extensive experience in industrial
labs. She is principal investigator on the NSF grant
Always On Relational Agents for Social Support of
Older Adults with Chuck Rich, WPI, and Tim Bickmore,
Northeastern University. She also serves as an
independent consultant on other projects, including the
MultiModal Prediction project with Louis-Philippe
Morency at ICT, and the Human Robot Interaction
project with Chuck Rich at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute. She has worked on multimodal (gesture)
interfaces using a humanoid robot for the role of
engagement in conversation, and on interfaces,
including those with speech, involving collaborative
interface agents in the COLLAGEN project.
She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence, and a senior member of
the IEEE. She serves as an associate editor of the
journal Artificial Intelligence, on the editorial
boards of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces,
and ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent
Systems, and on the scientific advisory board of IUI.
She has also been a member of
the scientific advisory boards for SIGDIAL, HLT-NAACL, and
the EU Cognitive
Systems for Cognitive Assistants (CoSy) project. She
has served as general chair for HLT-NAACL 2007,
program cochair of Intelligent User Interfaces 2006,
SIGIAL 2004, chair of Intelligent User Interfaces in
2001, and President of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (1989). She received her
Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.
