Catherine Pelachaud is a French computer scientist specializing in human–computer interaction and known for her work virtual assistants and on recognizing and generating facial expressions.
She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), a shared research center of CNRS and Sorbonne University.
Pelachaud completed a Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, jointly supervised by Norman Badler and Mark Steedman.
She became a director of research for CNRS in 2008, affiliated with the Information Processing and Communication Laboratory (LTCI) of Télécom Paris, and moved to ISIR in 2016.
[2] In 2016, the University of Geneva gave Pelachaud an honorary doctorate.