Candace L. (Candy) Sidner has a long standing interest in human communication and collaboration, and their application to agents, 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 a consultant on the Behavior Change Dialogue Project with Tim Bickmore at Northeastern University. 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, a senior member of the IEEE, and 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.