Nicole Novielli is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bari, Italy. Her expertise is in Affective Computing. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bari in May 2010 discussing a thesis on “Lexical Semantics of Dialogue Act”. In 2012 she joined the COLLAB research group, whose research is in Software Engineering and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, with special focus on collaborative software development.

Since 2006, her research is on affect modeling and detection in natural language interaction. She is broadly interested in how to recognize and exploit affective and cognitive states in human-computer interaction and in computer-supported cooperative work. Currently, she is working on the role of emotions in community-based Question & Answering and on sentiment analysis in microblogging.  She is the Principal Investigator of ‘EmoQuest - Investigating the Role of Emotions in Online Question & Answer Sites’, a three-year research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.

She has served on the PCs for several international conferences and workshops, including the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), the main forum for research on affective computing. Nicole was involved in the organization of international events including the SEmotion workshop at ICSE 2016 and 2017 (co-chair), ICGSE ‘13 (publicity team), and Sentipolc ‘16 (co-organizer), the sentiment polarity evaluation campaign on microblogging in Italian language. Nicole has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, conferences, and workshops. Since 2011, she is active in technology transfer. She is CTO and co-founder of a startup company that develops mobile solutions for promotion of events through gamification. She organized several events for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in ICT, including hackathons, courses on developing scalable business based on mobile technologies, and an open innovation summer camp on language technologies.