Özge Nilay Yalçın

Nilay is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University with a background in Cognitive Science, AI and HCI. Her research focuses on computational modeling of socio-emotional behaviors to develop interactive agents that can understand human and respond to behavior, and also advance our understanding of human cognition. She has been focusing on complex concepts such as empathy, affect, personality and theory of mind in a variety of contexts such as healthcare, education and creativity. She is currently growing her ACHAI (Affective computing and Human-AI Interaction) lab at SFU, where her students are pursuing research to understand factors shaping people’s behaviours with their growing personal interactions with virtual agents and develop innovations that would have a positive effect on our society. Nilay is a proud member of Women in CS groups, and an advocate of Open Science and Open-Source Software.