Empathy is often seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others emotions. This notion is often seen as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating social agents that are believable and able to engage with users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. For the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to nd ways to perceive the users emotions, but also to adapt to them, and react in an empathic way. This talk will provide an overview of this new challenging area of research, by analyzing empathy in the social relations established between humans and social agents (virtual and robotic). Short Biography Ana Maria Paiva is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (Departamento de Engenharia Informatica) of Instituto Superior Tecnico from the Technical University of Lisbon ( Universidade Tenica de Lisboa). She is also the group leader of GAIPS, (Grupo de Agentes Inteligentes e Personagens Sinteticas), a research group on agents and synthetic characters at INESC-ID. Her main scienti c interests lay in the area of Autonomous Agents, Embodied Conversational Agents and Robots and Multiagent Simulation Systems. Prof. Ana Paiva has been researching in the area of arti cial intelligence for the past twenty years, having also taught at IST during that period