About Me
I am a passionate AI researcher and entrepreneur, interested in finding solutions for real-world problems. Currently, I am a 4th year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute and founder of Stella AI. Before founding Stella AI in 2021, I co-founded TalkMeUp and led the product and research development during my time as CTO. My experiences in academia and in the startup world enabled me to combine scientific methods with problem-oriented strategies to find solutions that bring value to society.
Research Interest
My research interests lie in human communication, specifically in the generation of non-verbal-behavior in virtual agents. An integral part of non-verbal communication are emotions. During my Ph.D. journey, I have developed algorithms that can detect stress from facial expressions, enthusiasm in public speaking, and emotions combining attributes from gestures, facial expressions and vocal tonality. My current focus is in generating natural facial expressions in virtual agents to make human-computer-interaction more engaging.
Recent Publications
Towards Designing Enthusiastic AI Agents
Carla Viegas and Malihe Alikhani, IVA 2021
[PDF] [BibTex]
Entheos: A Multimodal Dataset for Studying Enthusiasm
Carla Viegas and Malihe Alikhani, ACL-IJCNLP 2021
[PDF] [BibTex]