Books By Association for Computing Machinery - Author

Birgit Lugrin (maiden name Birgit Endrass) is a professor for media informatics at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Since her first contact with a socially interactive agent (the Greta agent) in 2003, she has been fascinated about the research area. Ten years later, she received the prestigious IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award and the research award from Augsburg University for her doctoral thesis titled "Cultural Diversity for Virtual Characters". Today she could not be happier about the chance to co-edit this handbook and work with all the great researchers who have contributed to make this happen.

Catherine Pelachaud is Director of research at CNRS in the ISIR Laboratory, Sorbonne University. She received her PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, in 1991. She participated in the elaboration of the first embodied conversation agent system, Gesture-Jack, with Justine Cassell, Norman Badler, and Mar