Justine Cassell has received an honorary doctor of science from the University of Edinburgh for decades of cutting-edge research on dialogue systems that participate in conversation and storytelling with people.

Cassell, a professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, was a pioneer in integrating the study of embodied conversation into computer science, particularly how nonverbal moves — such as facial expressions, head and hand gestures, and posture —contribute content to the speaker's message, whether the speaker is a person or a machine. She is credited with developing the first embodied conversational agent (ECA), a virtual agent capable of interacting with humans using both speech and nonverbal behaviors.

Cassell's research has explored the benefits of using ECAs in elementary school education and in developing students' essential skill of curiosity. She advocates for using ECAs as virtual peer supports, particularly for children in underresourced environments or who come to school speaking marginalized dialects of English, such as African American Vernacular. Research by Cassell and her students has shown that building an ECA that speaks both the child's home dialect and mainstream school English can help children maintain this important index of culture and identity and, through that, enhance their school success.

Cassell is faculty in the Language Technologies Institute and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and is currently on leave to serve as the founding international chair at the Paris AI Research Institute (PRAIRIE). She has received the MIT Edgerton Prize, the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award, and the National Academy of Sciences Henry and Bryna David Award. In 2011, she was appointed to and chaired the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Robotics and Smart Devices. Cassell is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Association for Computing Machinery.