I am a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research in Los Angeles. My work applies state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for audio and natural language tasks in the context of interactions with artificial agents. I was previously a Post Doctoral Associate at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, USA. I worked on language-based character interaction and AI as part of Jill Fain Lehman's team.
I have also worked on robots for healthcare as a Senior Software Engineer at Futronics (NA) Corp.
I completed my PhD in Human-Robot Interaction at Plymouth University, U.K. supervised by Professor Tony Belpaeme, Dr Paul Baxter and Professor Angelo Cangelosi. My PhD work focused on interactive behavior for social robots. During my PhD, I worked alongside the EU FP7 DREAM project, the EU H2020 L2TOR project, and the EU FP7 ALIZ-E project.
Natural Language Processing
Developing technology for conversational memory, language understanding and generation.
Affective Computing
Machine learning approaches for emotion recognition and for agent emotion adaptation in interactions.
Human-Computer Interaction
Understanding how people interact with AI, and how we can design engaging user experiences.
Below are my publications with bibtex entries and PDFs where possible. Also see my Google Scholar page.
James Kennedy
Disney Research LA
email: james.kennedy [at] disney.com
web: https://james-kennedy.github.io/
LinkedIn