Jacky Casas

Phasellus enim sapien, blandit ullamcorper elementum eu, condimentum eu elit. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia luctus elit eget interdum.

Here is a list of my publications (in more details on Google Scholar). And down below, you can see the different editorial and organisational activities related to research.

2021

Enhancing Conversational Agents with Empathic Abilities

Emotional Paraphrasing Using Pre-trained Language Models

Empathic Interactions in Automated Vehicles #EmpathicCHI

Country Localisation of Twitter Users

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) on the Edge

2020

Trends & Methods in Chatbot Evaluation

Embodied Conversational Agent for Emotional Recognition Training

Empathic Chatbot Response for Medical Assistance

Plateforme d'extraction et d'analyse de conversations

Overview of the Transformer-based Models for NLP Tasks

Early Detection of Foodborne Illnesses in Social Media

* these authors contributed equally.

2019

Empathic Response Generation in Chatbots

2018

Early Detection of Food Intoxication in Swizerland using Twitter

Ubiquitous Chatbots: Workshop on Wearable and Embodied Conversational Agents

Food Diary Coaching Chatbot

Agent Conversationnel comme Coach Nutritionnel

Rupert the Nutritionist, the Efficient Conversational Agent

Workshops organization

• #EmpathicCHI: Workshop on Empathic Interactions in Automated Vehicles
  during CHI 2021 – Online.
• Ubiquitous Chatbots: Workshop on Wearable and Embodied Converational Agents
  during UBICOMP 2018 – Singapore.

Program Committee

• PC at SwissText 2022.
• PC at SwissText 2021.
• PC at SwissText/KONVENS 2020.

Reviewer activities

• Reviewer for SwissText 2022 – online.
• Reviewer for CHI2022 – online.
• Reviewer for SwissText 2021 – online.
• Reviewer for CHI2021 – online.
• Reviewer for EAI HealthWear 2020 – online.
• Reviewer for NordiCHI'20 – Tallinn, Estonia.
• Reviewer for SwissText/KONVENS 2020 – Applied track & Demo track – Zürich, Switzerland.
• Reviewer for AH2020 – 11th Augmented Human International Conference – Canada.
• Reviewer for AVI 2020 – International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces – Island of Ischia, Italy.
• Reviewer for WACAI2020 – Workshop sur les affects, compagnons artificiels et interactions – Île d'Oléron, France.
• Reviewer for JMUI – Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces – Springer 2020.
• Reviewer for AH2019 – 10th Augmented Human International Conference – Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France.
• Reviewer for AH2018 – 9th Augmented Human International Conference – Seoul, Korea.
  

I started as a teaching assistant for various courses in 2016 and then took more an more responsibilities transitioning to giving lectures (until 2021). Further down the page you will find a list of the projects I supervised over the years.

Seminar Conversational agents & chatbots

• 2019-2020: Lecturer & supervisor (9 students)
• 2018-2019: Lecturer & supervisor (8 students)
• 2017-2018: Lecturer & supervisor (12 students)

Web Engineering (WebEng)

• 2017.11.17: Lecture “Conversational agents and serverless computing”

Information Systems 2 (SI-II)

• 2019-2020 - Lecturer
• 2018-2019 - Lecturer

Information Systems (SI-I)

• 2019-2020 - Lecturer
• 2018-2019 - Teaching assistant
• 2017-2018 - Teaching assistant
• 2016-2017 - Teaching assistant

Machine Learning (ML)

• 2018-2019 - Teaching assistant
• 2017-2018 - Teaching assistant
• 2016-2017 - Teaching assistant

Software Engineering (GL-1 & GL-T)

• 2018-2019 - Teaching assistant
• 2017-2018 - Teaching assistant
• 2016-2017 - Teaching assistant

User Interface (UseInf)

• 2021.04-05: Lecture “Conversational agents” + Practical work + Projects supervision
• 2020.04: Lecture “Conversational agents” + Practical work + Mini-projects supervision
• 2019.03: Lecture “Conversational agents” + Practical work + Mini-projects supervision
• 2018.03: Lecture “Conversational agents” + Practical work + Mini-projects supervision

Multimodal Processing, Recognition & Interaction (MPRI)

• 2019.11.05: Practical work “Novelties & outliers detection with SVM”
• 2018.11.06: Practical work “Novelties & outliers detection with SVM”
• 2017.11.14: Practical work “Novelties & outliers detection with SVM”
• 2016.11.29: Lecture “Tweets classifications with neural networks (the SSPM case)”

Over the years I supervised some student projects that I listed here below:

Master thesis

• Samuel Torche [2020-2021] – Emotional paraphrasing.
• Pascal Zaugg [2019-2020] – Context in Conversational Agents.
• Cheryl Sarrouh and Toufic Yammine [2020] – Integrated AI Pipeline.
• Timo Spring [2019-2020] – Enhancing Conversational Agents with Empathic Abilities.
• Silas Berger [2019-2020] – Twitter User Localization.
• Thomas Kolonko [2018-2019] – Evaluation of Deep Learning Methods on SEM Images of Asbestos.

Bachelor thesis

• Nicolas Crausaz [2020] – NLU on the Edge (with Deeplink).
• Samuel Torche [2019] – Messaging applications extraction tool & conversation analysis.
• Leonardo Genini [2017] – Maester Luwin: a chatbot related to the Game of Thrones world.

Master semester projects

• Samuel Torche [2020] – Deep understanding of written user query.
• Charles Perriard [2020] – Cyberbullying and Social Networks.

Bachelor semester projects

• Nicolas Crausaz [2020] – Movie Dialog bot (with Deeplink).
• Luke Perrottet [2020] – Multilingual Appointment Chatbot (with Deeplink).
• Philippe Miche [2019] – Conversation anonymization.
• Ayrton Dumas & Samuel Torche [2018] – The Swiss Way of Following: Network analysis of Swiss Twitter users.
• Charles Perriard & Marco Mattei [2018] – Décortiquons ce compte Twitter: Analysis of a Twitter user account to localize it.
• Alexandre Dessonnaz [2018] – Amiante: Asbestos image classification.
• Jonas Egger & Andrea Ruffini [2017] – fr-Tweet-ch: Sorting Swiss tweets from foreign ones.
• Thomas Schaller [2017] – TweetsML: Extracting relevant tweets out of a huge amount of unrelevant ones.

Trainees

• Jean Khoury [2020] – Norovirus: Epidemic detection using tweets.
• Sylviane Ly [2019] – Extraction of personality from text (MBTI personality classification).
• Alain El Khoury [2019] – HumanTech chatbot: a chatbot that gives information website visitors.
• Zahi Alchemaly [2018] – Chatbot that helps fighting binge eating disorders.
• Chedid Dagher [2017] – Developement of a web platform that collects and analyzes tweets.
• Hugo Belhomme [2017] – Nutribot: a chatbot that tracks and analyzes your food intake.
• Tarek Azzi [2016] – Swiss vote outcome predictions based on press articles.

Civil service

• Nathan Quinteiro [2017] – EVASQ (EVAluation des Symptômes et de la Qualité de vie) : Digital survey system to help improve the life of patients with heart failures. Collaboration between HEdS, HEIA-FR and HFR.

Project management

• Jérôme Vonlanthen [2019] – Work on AlertCenter and RASA projects.
• Samuel Torche [summer 2019] – Work on a messaging apps extraction tool.
• Laurent Chassot [2019] – Work on AlertCenter.
• Laurent Zufferey [2018] – Work on AlertCenter.
• Ismaïl Senhaji [2017] – Work on Docker deployment.
• Michael Stadler [2017] – Work on Docker deployment.

Some key moments in my PhD, or milestones I want to share with you.

2021

May 24 - I presented our paper "Country Localisation of Twitter Users" at ICICS 2021.
May 07 - I co-organized a workshop during CHI 2021.
Jan-Jul - I write my thesis :).

2020

Nov 12 - I presented the Alert Center project to the FSVO.
Oct 29 - I presented our paper "Trends & Methods in Chatbot Evaluation" in a workshop at ICMI2020.
Sep 29 - I organized a colloquium at HumanTech with Signderiva.
May 01 - I have read books daily for 1 year.
Feb 13 - I created Empathic Labs with Karl and Fouad.

2019

Jun 18 - I presented our paper "Empathic Response Generation in Chatbots" at SwissText.
Apr 11 - I presented the "Alert Center" project during the EREN meeting at EFSA in Parma, Italy.
Jan 07 - Received my Certificate for the Innosuisse Start-up Training "Business Concept".

2018

Nov 22 - Received my DAS in Didactic from UNIFR.
Oct 12 - I organized a workshop in Singapore during UBICOMP 2018.
Aug 12 - I ran Sierre-Zinal (31km, 2500 D+).
May 23 - I launched Asylamba Influence on Steam.

I did a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Fribourg and HES-SO Fribourg. I worked at the HumanTech Institute. My domains are Natural Language Processing, Empathy in HCI and Conversational Agents. In my PhD student journey, I experimented the use of empathy to improve the interactions between users and conversational agents.

This webpage mainly shows the academic and research activities carried out during my PhD (between 2016 and 2021). Since october 2021, I am lead developer in the team that develops the chatbot and voicebot at PostFinance.

Empathic Labs

In 2020, I launched Empathic Labs. The goal is to share projects around empathic interactions between humans and machines, so that people interested in the field can find interesting resources in one place. We write articles on the Empathic Labs Medium page.

As of June 12, 2021, we published 24 articles with a total of more than 4'000 views! We reach 440 followers on the different social networks.

Contact Me

You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. I also wrote some articles on Medium, check it out.