Professor drª Ana Paiva
Ana Paiva is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) from the University of Lisbon and is also the Coordinator of GAIPS – “Group of Artificial Intelligence for People and Society ” at INESC-ID (see http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/gaips/). Her group investigates the creation of complex systems using an agent-based approach, with a special focus on social agents. Prof. Paiva’s main research focuses on the problems and techniques for creating social agents that can simulate human-like behaviours, be transparent, natural and eventually, give the illusion of life. Over the years she has addressed this problem by engineering agents that exhibit specific social capabilities, including emotions, personality, culture, non-verbal behaviour, empathy, collaboration, and others. Her main contributions in the area of social agents have been in the field of embodied conversational agents, multi-agent systems, affective computing, prosocial computing and social robotics.