ANGELA
KESSELL
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Basic Perception and Cognition; Gesture; Psycholinguistics; Functional neuroimaging (esp. fMRI);
Spatial cognition
Applied Advanced human-computer interaction (HCI) design and evaluation; Context-aware and
mobile computing; UbiComp; Information visualization; Gestural, speech, and multimodal
interfaces.
EDUCATION
Sept. 2003 - Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Present Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology (expected Sept. 2008)
M.A., Cognitive Psychology (2005)
May 1997 Pomona College, Claremont, CA
B.A., Psychology, Summa Cum Laude
4.0 Major GPA, 3.9 Overall GPA
Thesis: Subliminal stroop effect: Nonconscious perception as predominantly semantic
EXPERIENCE
2000 - 2003 HRL Laboratories, Human-Centered Systems Dept., Computing Staff, Malibu, CA
+Summer '04 Research and development of mobile, spoken and multimodal, open dialog systems for route navigation, including:
* Spoken and multimodal interface design, development, and evaluation
* Quantitative component- and system-level performance evaluation, identification of weaknesses, change implementation, and measured improvement
* Qualitative assessment of user satisfaction and dialog success, solution finding, change implementation, and measured improvement
* Developed multi-channel, multi-condition human-system and human-human dialog corpora for iterative system evaluation, grammar and language model enhancement, conversational analysis, and automatic speech recognizer (ASR) training
* Developed a Windows-based server controlling in-vehicle head-up display (HUD) and accepting speech and manual input
* Supervised project programmer and interns
* Assisted in management of dialog systems projects
1998 - 2000 UCLA Cognition and Aging Lab, Research Associate, Los Angeles, CA
Empirical and archival research in psycholinguistics, including:
* Speech perception and production
* Ambiguity and perceptual reorganization
* Auditory illusions (e.g. Verbal Transformation Effect), auditory stream segregation, probabilistic phonotactics, and spectral fissioning in phonemic transformations
* Cognitive aging, amnesia, dyslexia and dysgraphia
* Interactive activation models of cognition
* Critical analysis of patient H.M.’s single word and sentence reading
* Supervised research assistants
1997 - 1998 Law Offices of Booth and Koskoff, Law Clerk, Torrance, CA
Analyzed new and prior cases, medical records, depositions, and investigative reports.
PUBLICATIONS, INTERNAL RESEARCH REPORTS, and INVITED TALKS
Kessell, A. & Tversky, B. (Nov. 2007). To Go in Circles or Forge Straight Ahead: Depicting
Cyclical Processes. Psychonomic Society 48th Annual Meeting. Long Beach, CA.
Kessell, A. (2007). Gestures for thinking and explaining. Stanford Psychology Department
Cognitive Seminar. Stanford, CA.
Kessell, A. (2006). Perception of visual scenes: What is the relationship between task,
neural activation, and phenomenology? Vision Lunch. Stanford, CA.
Kessell, A. (2006). Perception of objects and scenes. Cogtale Hour. Stanford, CA.
Kessell, A. & Tversky, B. (2006). Using diagrams and gestures to think and talk about
insight problems. Proceedings of the 28th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science
Society. Vancouver, Canada.
Kessell, A. & Chan, (2006). Castaway: A context-aware task management system. In
Extended Abstracts of CHI 2006: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. Montreal, Canada.
Kessell, A., & Tversky, B. (2005). Gestures and diagrams for thinking and
communicating. Psychonomic Society 46th Annual Meeting. Toronto, Canada.
Kessell, A., & Tversky, B. (2005). Gestures for thinking and explaining. Proceedings of the
27th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Stresa, Italy.
Kessell, A. (2005). Gesture and insight problems. Stanford Language Users’ Group.
Stanford, CA.
Kessell, A. (2004). Gesture as cognitive tool. Friday Cognitive Seminar. Stanford, CA.
Kessell, A., & Belvin, R. (2002). Empirical investigation of the effects of the passage of
time and movement along a route on the resolution of pronominal anaphora. HRL Labs
Internal Research Report. Malibu, CA.
Kessell, A. (2002). Empirical investigation of the effects of speaker workload and prompt
presentation modality on speech errors. HRL Labs Internal Research Report. Malibu,
CA.
Kessell, A. (2002). Quantitative evaluation of the Navigator and Destiny dialog systems:
Word recognition accuracy, concept understanding, and overall interaction success.
HRL Labs Internal Research Report. Malibu, CA.
Kessell, A. (2001). Multi-level strategies for resolving or reducing ambiguities inherent in
spoken destination entry for navigation. General Motors 2001 Review of Directed
Research. Malibu, CA.
Kessell, A. (2002). Dialog management and semantic representation within the MIT
Galaxy system architecture. Tutorial given at General Motors R&D and Planning.
Warren, MI.
HONORS AND AWARDS
Stanford Media X Graduate Student Fund in HCI (2006)
National Science Foundation Travel Award for Cognitive Science Conference (2005)
Chancellor's List (2004 - 2006)
National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship (2003 - 2005)
Summa Cum Laude (1997)
Pomona Psychology Prize (1997)
Psi Chi, Psychology National Honor Society (1997)
Phi Beta Kappa (1997)
Pomona Scholar (1994, 1995, 1996)
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2004 - Stanford University, Teaching Assistant, Stanford, CA
Present Introduction to Cognition and the Brain (Jan 2008)
Introduction to Statistical Methods: Precalculus (2007)
Introduction to Learning and Memory (2006)
Introduction to Perception (2006)
Statistical Methods for Behavioral and Social Sciences (Graduate level) (2004)
ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIVITIES
Colloquium Committee, Stanford Psychology (2006 - 2007)
Graduate Admissions Committee, Stanford Psychology (2005, 2006)
Cognitive Seminar Committee, Stanford Psychology (2005 - 2006)