Bringing Digital Empathy to Conversational AI Agents

Bringing Digital Empathy to Conversational AI Agents
Empathy is central to everyday interactions and enables stronger collaboration, leadership, and communication. Extending this human capacity to conversational AI can raise engagement and satisfaction, but it also brings risks such as dependency and overreliance. This talk shares recent efforts at Microsoft Research to map the many forms of digital empathy and highlights the opportunities and challenges of building it into conversational agents.
About our speaker
Javier Hernandez is a Principal Researcher in the Interactive Multimodal Futures group at Microsoft Research and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing journal. Javier's research focuses on how future AI agents can collaborate effectively by understanding users more deeply and adapting to their context. Before Microsoft, he was a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he earned his Ph.D. in the Affective Computing group. His work, spanning mental health support, emotion-aware technology, and user-centered AI, has received multiple best paper awards and has been featured in National Geographic and The Economists.

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