Hi! I'm Jocelyn, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in
the Personal Robots Group, advised by
Professor Cynthia
Breazeal (MIT Media Lab) and co-advised by Professor Maarten Sap (CMU LTI). I graduated from
MIT in
2021 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science alongside a minor in Economics and in 2023 with a
Master's in Media Arts and Sciences.
My research is broadly situated in the field of human-centered AI and aims to
advance computational
approaches, primarily using NLP and deep learning, for human-AI interactions that can promote
connection,
empathy, and
prosociality. I believe that socially interactive AI can be used as a tool
to better contextualize, understand, and express the human experience, both for personalization and
interpersonal dynamics. My work focuses on developing social-emotional reasoning
capabilities in
artificial agents, as well as understanding the mechanisms behind human communicative behaviors. I
use these insights to design new human-AI interactions with physically embodied or disembodied
social AIs that can improve connection and foster prosocial relationships between people.
Additionally, I am interested in evaluating the underlying capabilities, safety, and alignment of
socially and emotionally intelligent AIs and place a strong emphasis on assessing the impact of
interactive systems in the real world, across applications including emotional wellbeing, learning,
and communications & storytelling. I have published my work across both NLP +
HCI venues, including ACL, EMNLP, CHI, CSCW, and ACII. My work is generously supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and I am currently an MIT Teaching Development Fellow.
Previously, I worked at Apple AI/ML as a research intern in Human-Centered
Machine Intelligence. I've also worked at
Facebook
(Software Engineering Intern), Citadel (Software
Engineering Intern), and Affectiva (Data Science
Intern), where I've developed full stack applications, backend infrastructures, and machine learning
pipelines.
Aside from my work,
I like to illustrate comics, sketch characters, and write anything ranging from poems
to essays to novels. My awarded creative works often center around themes of racial identity, the
meaning of art, and the digital age.
Check out the rest of this site to learn more, and feel free to reach out!