Timothy Bickmore

Timothy W. Bickmore is an American computer scientist who is a Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He is known for his research on relational agents — computer agents designed to build long-term social-emotional relationships with their users — and their application in health education, health behaviour change, and palliative care. He served as Associate Dean for Research at the Khoury College from 2017 to 2022. His doctoral thesis, Relational Agents: Effecting Change through Human-Computer Relationships, introduced the concept of relational agents. He joined Northeastern University in 2005 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 2011 and to full professor in 2016. Unlike conventional chatbots, relational agents use speech, gaze, gesture, intonation, and other nonverbal modalities to emulate face-to-face conversation, and are designed to remember past interactions in order to build therapeutic alliance with users over time. The virtual nurse was demonstrated to Kathleen Sebelius, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, by the director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2009. The project received over $1 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and was covered by CNBC, New Scientist, CNET, Vice, and the Daily Mail.

COVID-19 vaccine promotion Bickmore received NIH funding to develop a virtual nurse agent named "Clara" to promote COVID-19 vaccine uptake among Black communities in Boston, partnering with the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston. The agent was designed as a Christian virtual health counsellor who builds trust through personal disclosure and remembers details about patients' lives across interactions.

Clinical trials Bickmore's relational agents have been deployed as virtual nurses, lactation consultants, exercise coaches, preconception health counsellors, and genetic counsellors in over 25 clinical trials with more than 4,000 participants. His work includes a randomised controlled trial published in The Lancet Digital Health demonstrating the use of a conversational agent to improve preconception health among young African American women.

Selected publications