Justine Cassell Jis faculty at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Gesture and Narrative Language research group. She holds a master's degree in Literature from the Université de Besançon (France) (France), a master's degree in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in Psychology and in Linguistics. After having spent ten years studying verbal and non-verbal aspects of human communication through microanalysis of videotaped data she began to bring her knowledge of human conversation to the design of computational systems. Currently she and her students are working on the third generation of Embodied Conversational Agent (Rea), and have also integrated the foundations of this work into the design of a 3D graphical online world (BodyChat). Cassell has also researched how embodied conversational agents, and other kinds of virtual listeners, can encourage and enhance storytelling among children and adults and, with her students, has implemented a suite of story-listening systems.