Mathieu Chollet is a Lecturer in the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing. His research is focused on human-agent social interactions: interactions between human users and virtual agents, autonomous virtual characters with natural communication abilities such as dialogue and non-verbal behaviour. Some of his research interests in this domain include behaviour planning for virtual agents (e.g., to allow them to convey emotions or social attitudes), multimodal social signal processing (i.e., applying signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques to detect users’ facial, bodily, and vocal behaviour), and novel human-agent interaction paradigms (e.g., the use of virtual agents to train social skills or for reducing social anxiety).
Before joining the University of Glasgow, he was an assistant professor at IMT Atlantique, a major technological university in Nantes (France), after post-doctoral appointments at UofG’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (Los Angeles, CA, USA), and the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan). He obtained his PhD in 2015 from Telecom Paristech (Paris, France), on the topic of non-verbal behaviour planning for virtual agents’ social attitude expression. His current research themes include understanding the mechanisms underpinning psychosocial stress during interactions with virtual characters, and the design and evaluation of artificial-intelligence based approaches for social skills training and team collaboration augmentation.