Langxuan “James” Yin

Ph.D. Candidate

College of Computer & Information Science

Northeastern University

I’m a Ph.D. student under the advisement of Professor Timothy Bickmore, working as a research assistant in the Relational Agents Group at Northeastern University.

In my spare time, I play role-playing games and am a good storyteller. I also draw manga. My artist’s bio and a collection of my art can be found on Deviantart.

Research

One of my current research interests lies in designing educational games that broaden its players’ knowledge and promote behavior change, especially in health-related domains. I’m also interested in cultural anthropology and its applications in designing embodied conversational agents, i.e. intelligent virtual characters capable of engaging in conversation with humans employing human-like verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Publications

§  Yin, L, Bickmore, T, Cortes, D. (2010) The Impact of Linguistic and Cultural Congruity on Persuasion by Conversational Agents, Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents conference (IVA), Philadelphia, PA

§  Bickmore, T, Schulman, D, Yin, L. (2010) Maintaining Engagement in Long-term Interventions with Relational Agents, International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents 24(6): 648-666

§  Yin, L., Bickmore, T., Byron, D., and Cortes, D. (2010) Cultural and Linguistic Adaptation of Relational Agents for Health Counseling, Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare, Atlanta, GA [ PDF]

§  Bickmore, T., Schulman, D., and Yin, L. (2009) Engagement vs. Deceit: Virtual Humans with Human Autobiographies, Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), Amsterdam. (Best Paper Award) [ PDF]

§  Bickmore, T., Pfeifer, L., and Yin, L. (2008) The Role of Gesture in Document Explanation by Embodied Conversational Agents, International Journal of Semantic Computing, Vol. 2, No. 1, 47–70 [ PDF]