My main research focuses on the problems and techniques for creating social agents that can simulate human-like behaviours, be transparent, natural and eventually, give the illusion of life. Over the years I’ve dealt with this problem by engineering agents that exhibit specific social capabilities, including aspects such as emotions, personality, culture, non-verbal behaviour, empathy, collaboration, and others. My main contributions to the area of social agents have been in the field of virtual agents, multi-agent systems, affective computing and social robotics.