Founder and CEO of Semio, developing a platform and design tools for multimodal conversational commerce and AI (i.e., speech and body language) between human users and smart devices, from personal/mobile computing to social robots. I received my PhD and MS in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in 2015, and my BS in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2007. My overarching interest is in bringing digital characters (on-screen or physical) to life through automated human social behavior recognition and autonomous social behavior generation in face-to-face human-machine interactions. When I’m not working on chat bots, I enjoy playing music, snowboarding, or drinking a good brew (coffee or beer) near where I live in Downtown Los Angeles.