Farnaz Nouraei
(she/her/hers)
PhD Student
Research interests
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Natural Language Processing
- Computer Vision
- Artificial Intelligence
Education
- MS in Computer Engineering, Brown University
- BS in Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology
Biography
Farnaz Nouraei is a doctoral student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Timothy Bickmore. Her doctoral work, which she began in 2021 and expects to complete in 2026, focuses on human–computer interaction. In particular, she is interested in the applications of conversational agents in behavioral interventions, and how AI and other computational approaches can deliver better health promotion content, increase engagement, and facilitate behavior change. She is affiliated with the Relational Agents Group.
Labs and groups
Recent publications
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Virtual Agent-based Communication Skills Training to Facilitate Health Persuasion Among Peers
Citation: Farnaz Nouraei, Keith Rebello, Mina Fallah, Prasanth Murali, Haley Matuszak, Valerie Jap, Andrea G. Parker, Michael K. Paasche-Orlow, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2025). Virtual Agent-based Communication Skills Training to Facilitate Health Persuasion Among Peers Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact., 9, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3711101 -
Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations
Citation: Ian Steenstra, Farnaz Nouraei, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2025). Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations CoRR, abs/2502.18673. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.18673 -
Investigating User Perceptions of Collaborative Agenda Setting in Virtual Health Counseling Session
Citation: Mina Fallah, Farnaz Nouraei, Hye Sun Yun, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2024). Investigating User Perceptions of Collaborative Agenda Setting in Virtual Health Counseling Session CoRR, abs/2407.06123. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.06123 -
Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents
Citation: Mehdi Arjmand, Farnaz Nouraei, Ian Steenstra, Timothy W. Bickmore. (2024). Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents CoRR, abs/2407.01824. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.01824
