Hannes H. Vilhjálmsson is a doctorate student in the Media Arts and Sciences program at the MIT Media Laboratory where he is a part of the Gesture and Narrative Language research group. His focus is on embodiment in virtual spaces, both for humanoid agents and avatars. In particular he is looking at the role of the body in initiating and sustaining a conversation.

Hannes received his MS degree in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT in spring 1997. His thesis, titled "Autonomous Communicative Behaviors in Avatars", stresses the importance of appropriate non-verbal behaviors in face-to-face interaction and explores ways to automatically animate some of these cues in avatars, drawing from existing literature on human behavior. Before coming to MIT, Hannes finished a BS in Computer Science at the University of Iceland and had been working for a few years as a programmer and consultant, specializing in graphical user interfaces and scientific visualization.