Stacy C. Marsella

Research interests

• Human behavior modeling, particularly health applications

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, Rutgers University
• MS in Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• BA in Economics, Harvard University

Biography

Stacy Marsella is a professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Science at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

Marsella’s multidisciplinary research is grounded in the computational modeling of human cognition, emotion, and social behavior, as well as the evaluation of those models. Beyond its relevance to understanding human behavior, the work has applications in health interventions, social skills training, and planning operations. Marsella's applied work includes frameworks for large-scale social simulations of towns and a range of techniques and tools for creating virtual humans, facsimiles of people that can engage in face-to-face interactions.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Marsella was a research professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a research director at the Institute for Creative Technologies. He also held positions at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (1996–2009) and at Bell Labs (1995–96).

Marsella has served as a general chair of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems and chair of Intelligent Virtual Agents. In 2010, he received an ACM SIIGART career award for his contributions to agent research. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, a board member of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and a member of the steering committee for Intelligent Virtual Agents. He also is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists and a member of both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the International Society for Research on Emotions.

Recent publications