She is also the group leader of GAIPS, (Grupo de Agentes Inteligentes e Personagens Sintéticas), a research group on agents and synthetic characters at INESC-ID. Her main scientific interests lay in the area of Autonomous Agents, Embodied Conversational Agents and Robots and Multiagent Simulation Systems. Prof. Ana Paiva has been researching in the area of artificial intelligence for the past twenty years, having also taught at IST during that period.