Stacy Marsella

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

HCC: AI-driven Platform for Training Social Skills by Participation in Spontaneous, Adaptive, Multimodal Interaction Scenarios 

Social skills — reading intentions, navigating complex interpersonal situations, responding in the moment — underpin nearly every successful interaction. This project builds an AI-driven training platform where people practice those skills in open-ended encounters with virtual agents that convey beliefs and social cues through gesture, gaze, posture, and facial expression as well as language, with a particular focus on Theory of Mind: the ability to reason about what others believe and intend. A multi-agent framework drives the system, with separate models that design personalized scenarios, steer them as they unfold, animate the virtual humans, and refine agent behavior from learner feedback.