Laurence Devillers, is a professor in computer science applied to social sciences, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne since 2011.

Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and researcher at the CNRS Laboratoire d'informatique pour la mécanique et les sciences de l'ingénieur (Limsi), Laurence Devillers leads the research team Affective and social dimensions in spoken interactions. Her research interests focus on human-computer interaction, emotion detection, spoken dialogue and affective and interactive robotics.

She has contributed to several national (ANR Tecsan Armen, FUI Romeo, BPI Romeo2) and European (Rex Humaine, Chist-era Joker) projects dedicated to "affective and social human-robot interactions". She is a member of the CERNA (Commission de réflexion sur l'éthique de la recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique) of the Allistene alliance. She participated in the drafting of the report on the ethics of the robotics researcher and directed the report on the ethics of machine learning. She was a member of the board of the IDEX Paris-Saclay LIDEX ISN, Institut de la Société Numérique (University of Paris-Saclay) where she led the pole on human-machine co-evolution within the framework of the Institut de la société numérique. She is now in charge of the multidisciplinary convergence institute DATAIA of Paris-Saclay (artificial intelligence and data sciences) since 2017. She leads a DATAIA Institute project on the ethics of social robotics: Bad nudge Bad robot with researchers in behavioural economics and lawyers.

She is involved in the deployment of the national platform TransAlgo (Transparency and explicability of algorithms). She is also a founding member of the AI HUB (private-public ecosystem) on applied ethics (since 2017).

She is a member of the ISCA and ISCA Distinguished Lecturers for 2017-2018.

She is an IEEE member, involved in the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems (since 2016), chairman since 2018: working group P7008: Standard for Ethically Driven Nudging for Robotic, Intelligent and Autonomous Systems.

Laurence Devillers was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur in 2020. The medal was presented by the mathematician Cédric Villani on 12 April 2022 at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris.

Her books

Laurence Devillers has published :

• a thesis (1992) Reconnaissance de parole continue avec un système hybride neuronal et Markovien, doctoral thesis in science, specialising in computer science, Orsay, November 1992 ;
• a thesis (2006) Les Émotions dans les interactions Homme-Machine: perception, détection et génération, Habilitation à diriger des recherches en informatique de l'université Paris XI, Orsay, December 2006;
• Des robots et des hommes : mythes, fantasmes et réalité : Mythes, fantasmes et réalité, éditions Plon, 2017, 288 p. (ISBN 978-2-259-25227-0)
• Emotional Robots: Health, Surveillance, Sexuality... and ethics in all of this, Observatory Publishing, "Essays" series, 2020, 272 p. (ISBN 979-10-329-0198-4)
• La Souveraineté numérique dans l'après-crise (Digital Sovereignty in the post-crisis era), Éditions de l'Observatoire, "Et après?" series, 2020 (ISBN 979-10-329-1576-9)

She has also published more than 150 articles in international and national refereed journals and chapters in collective works.