Relationships between peers are of paramount importance in children's lives. In this talk I propose a particular approach to the study of children's peer relationships that can also be applied to their relationships with virtual peers. I focus on those most human of relationship types - intrinsically dyadic phenomena such as rapport, friendship, intimacy, and interpersonal closeness. I rely on this approach to describe the minutiae of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that function in peers to evoke, deepen, demonstrate, and destroy peer relationships. I highlight the need for differentiating the observable behaviors from inferable underlying states by demonstrating how putatively negative behaviors may play a positive role in peer rapport. And I describe some important roles that these often neglected aspects of children's behavior may play in learning, when the learning partner is another child, or a technology. Each step of the talk is illustrated by experiments that involve both human-human and human-technology interaction. I include novel approaches to designing educational technologies that can improve learning gains through rapport management. And finally, lessons are drawn both for the study of children's behavior, and the improved design of technologies capable of engaging in interaction with people over the long-term.

Short Bio: Justine Cassell is currently on leave from Carnegie Mellon University to hold the founding international chair at the PRAIRIE Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in AI, and to serve as Directrice de Recherche at Inria Paris. Before going on leave, she was Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact in the School of Computer Science at CMU, and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Previously Cassell was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Doctoral Program and Research Center, and before that was a tenured professor at MIT. She holds a License in Lettres Modernes from the Université de Besançon and a double PhD in developmental psychology and linguistics from the University of Chicago. Cassell has received the MIT Edgerton Prize, Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award, the AAMAS Test of Time paper award, and the National Academy of Sciences Henry and Bryna David Prize for Social Sciences applicable to policy. She is a fellow of the AAAS, Royal Academy of Scotland, and the ACM.

The keynote will present comparative experimental data on the formation of speech and communication skills of typically developing children and children with atypical development - with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Down syndrome, and intellectual disabilities. Specificity of the analysis of children's speech will be noted, databases of children's speech and their use will be presented. The main emphasis will be placed on the reflection in the characteristics of the voice of the pathological states of infants and children, on the revealing biomarkers of diseases according to the features of the speech and voice of children.

In this keynote, Dr. Huijding addresses how observations of parent- child interaction in the laboratory are used to understand child development and behavior in social science research in general, and more specifically in studies at Utrecht University. In addition, he focuses on issues in this type of observational studies, reflects on how AI may help overcome some of these issues, and addresses the challenges that could be a starting point for further discussion.