HOME RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS CONTACT

James Kennedy

Research Scientist

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.

Research

Natural Language Processing

chat icon

Developing technology for conversational memory, language understanding and generation.

Affective Computing

smile icon

Machine learning approaches for emotion recognition and for agent emotion adaptation in interactions.

Human-Computer Interaction

robot icon

Understanding how people interact with AI, and how we can design engaging user experiences.

Publications

Below are my publications with bibtex entries and PDFs where possible. Also see my Google Scholar page.

Contact

James Kennedy
Disney Research LA
email: james.kennedy [at] disney.com
web: https://james-kennedy.github.io/
LinkedIn