Candace L. (Candy) Sidner has a long standing interest in
human communication and collaboration, and their
application to agents, robots, and interfaces, especially
those using gesture, social behavior, speech, and
natural language. Candy has extensive experience in
industrial labs, and is a Division scientist at BAE
Systems AIT in Burlington, Massachusetts and an
independent consultant on projects including the
Behavior Change Dialogue Project with Tim Bickmore at
Northeastern University, and the Human Robot
Interaction project with Chuck Rich at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute. She previously worked on
multimodal (gesture) interfaces using a humanoid robot
for the role of engagement in conversation, and on
interfaces, including those with speech, involving
collaborative interface agents in the COLLAGEN
project.
She is a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence, and a senior member of
the IEEE. She serves as an associate editor of the
journal Artificial Intelligence, on the scientific advisory
boards of IUI, SIGDIAL and HLT-NAACL, and was a member
of the scientific advisory board for the EU Cognitive
Systems for Cognitive Assistants (CoSy) project. She
has served as general chair for HLT-NAACL 2007,
program cochair of Intelligent User Interfaces 2006,
SIGIAL 2004, chair of Intelligent User Interfaces in
2001, and President of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (1989). She received her
Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science.