David Novick's research focuses on interactive systems and, especially, building rapport in multimodal conversation. Current research projects include (1) making conversations with intelligent virtual agents more effective through modeling and implementing conversation control acts and (2) integrating entrepreneurship into engineering education.

Dr. Novick's research on multimodal conversation explores computational pragmatics, especially nonverbal behaviors associated with conversation. Dr. Novick and his students have developed intelligent virtual agents that converse with humans in highly engaging games or simulations, which provide a way to study what affects the development of rapport between humans and agents.