[Colloquium] TTIC Colloquium: Bonnie J. Dorr-Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC)

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Monday, Sept. 22nd at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Bonnie J. Dorr-Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition
(IHMC)

Title:        Human-Centered Language Processing: Event Detection and
Impaired Speech
               Recognition

Abstract:

Systems that help humans with difficult or tedious tasks requiring
intelligence (e.g., translation of language, causal reasoning in medicine,
or autonomous driving) are central to the field of artificial intelligence.
 A common viewpoint associated with such systems is that humans are
expected to adapt to machines, rather than the other way around.  This
viewpoint presumes a “one size fits all” approach that ignores the need for
adaptability to user-specific preferences, intentions, beliefs, and
abilities.  Research at IHMC takes into account user-specific facets in the
design of technology for understanding and assisting humans with a range of
human modalities, including sensory perception, motion and action, and
multi-party interchanges.  This talk focuses on two areas of such research:
(1) communication technologies that consider social context, as exemplified
in the DISCERN project for detection and characterization of emerging
events from formal and informal inputs; and (2) communication agents for
assistive technology, starting with understanding and adapting to
progressively impaired speech in the DESIPHER project.  As time permits,
additional human-centered research at IHMC will be presented (e.g., natural
language dialogue, humoid robotics, lunar rover exploration, and
exoskeleton research).



Biography:

Dr. Bonnie J. Dorr recently became Associate Director and Senior Research
Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) in
Ocala, where she is leading research efforts in Natural Language
Processing.  Her focus is on deep language understanding and semantics,
speech processing for intelligent living, discourse and communication
agents, summarization, multilingual processing, paraphrasing and automatic
evaluation metrics.  She joined IHMC from the University of Maryland, where
she is Professor Emerita in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and
the Department of Computer Science. She was an Associate Dean of the
College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and co-founded the
Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory.   For
three years, she was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), overseeing research in human language technology.
Her significant DARPA projects include Broad Operational Language
Translation (BOLT), Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT),
Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis, and Translation
(MADCAT), and Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS).  She holds
both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, with a Bachelor’s from Boston University. She is a
Sloan Fellow, a NSF Presidential Faculty (PECASE) Fellow, former president
of the Association for Computational Linguistics, AAAI Fellow (2013), and
most recently a member of the Leadership Florida Class of XXXIII (2014).

Host:  David McAllester,  mcallester at ttic.edu

-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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