Abstract: Various physical configurations that the human body can take (e.g., postures, facial expressions, and human affects in general) provide a precious resource for conveying social and emotional information in different human interactions. These interactions exist in any situation that involves some type of interpersonal communication: from the students’ interactions with the instructor to the patient-clinician dialogues in the hospital. In any interpersonal communication, body language and embodiment can carry propositional information, and by itself function as individual actions or as components of multimodal actions. Understanding the role of body features in human communications can lead to significant breakthroughs in the area of human-centered computing with numerous real-life applications. ‎

In this talk, I will discuss how various techniques from human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, gamification, immersive technologies, and ‎learning sciences can be applied in a principled manner to leverage ‎the human-human ‎and human-technology interactions. I will present the findings from a few of our recent projects that ‎focus on developing immersive interventions to promote the quality of user interactions in training, learning and rehabilitation scenarios. I will discuss broader impacts of this line of research, as well as future ‎directions of my research program, to create and study interactive embodied systems, especially with the implications for the elderly and people with special needs.

Short Bio: Roghayeh “Leila” Barmaki is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Whiting School of Engineering and ‎the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an ‎M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence. ‎In her research, Dr. Barmaki combines embodied ‎cognition and learning ‎sciences with technological advancements in augmented reality, and human-computer interaction to ‎design high-impact medical and educational interventions. ‎Her research has been recognized in selective ‎conference venues, and peer-reviewed journals such as the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), the ACM International Conferences on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), and Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), and the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL).‎