Newsletter September 2009

In this issue:

Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs

EDITORIAL

Greetings! Welcome to the September issue of the CTSB newsletter! Our faculty spotlight is Professor and CTSB affiliate Ian Horswill (EECS) and our featured student is Ph.D. graduate student Francisco Iacobelli (EECS). You will also meet the newest staff member in the CTSB and Articulab, Miriam Davidson.

Thank you for reading this issue and we look forward to seeing you!

- Christopher Riesbeck (CTSB Executive Committee) and Lindsey Lumley (Newsletter Editor, CTSB)

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Ian Horswill

Ian Horswill's work lies roughly within the areas of artificial intelligence and interactive art and entertainment. His AI research focuses on control systems for autonomous agents: how does an agent decide from moment to moment what to do, based on an ongoing stream of sensor data and a continually varying set of goals and entanglements with the world. His past work focused on robotics and computer vision, but his more recent work centers around the modeling and simulation of emotion, personality, and social behavior for virtual characters for games and interactive narrative. Interactive narrative is particularly interesting for AI because it provides a natural domain in which to examine aspects of human personality and behavior that one would not want to duplicate in service robots, such as aggression and depresssion.

Within interactive art and entertainment, he is interested in exploring alternative genres and interaction modes that can expand the medium. Interactive narrative is particularly interesting because it offers the promise of an aesthetics that emphasizes experiences of identification, empathy, and affiliation, over mastery, frustration, and control. However, making a piece that provides those experiences in practice is a difficult task that involves a number of interesting research problems in computer science and cognitive science.

Student Spotlight: Francisco Iacobelli

Francisco Iacobelli is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. His research explores intelligent strategies of information retrieval and aggregation to present users with relevant information that is on-point with a particular topic or news story. In particular, he is interested in (a) strategies for proactively selecting topics of interest; (b) generation of diverse information around these topics that is, of course, interesting in some dimension; and (c) developing applications that do this retrieval in a frictionless manner, that is, with minimal interruptions to the user.
Currently, he is working on "Tell Me More," an enhanced news reading experience that examines a news story the user is interested in and looks for similar news articles from other sources. Then, the system presents snippets of text that provide new information from these alternate sources, thus providing a fuller, more diverse and more objective perspective on a given news event. In addition, the technology used by this project can be easily adapted to languages other than English.

Francisco received his bachelor's degree from Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago, Chile and his MSc in Computer Science from DePaul University. He is currently working at the InfoLab, advised by Prof. Larry Birnbaum.

Staff Spotlight: Miriam Davidson

Miriam Davidson grew up in Champaign-Urbana, IL. After receiving a B.A. in Quantitative Economics from Tufts University in Medford, MA, Miriam moved to a kibbutz for five years, working variously as a farmer, a cost accountant and a part-time math and computer teacher. Over time, she entered the programming world, implementing a genetic ancestry tracking system for melons for a collaborative research project between the kibbutz farm and the university. Later, when working as a Cost Accountant in the factory, she developed programs to streamline her own Data Processing Department and other financial departments of the factory. Upon moving back to Illinois, she worked at Williams Electronic Games (WMS Gaming), managing a team of pinball and casino game software engineers and coordinating interdisciplinary projects.

After receiving an M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in Software Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, Miriam began work as a Software Engineer at APTE, creating educational games for schools. The software included animated character narrators, instructional videos, utilities and games with an element from a learning center. At APTE, the goal was to understand how children learn in their classrooms and either create a similar virtual learning environment or add a tool to enhance the students' classroom learning possibilities. Whether planning the approach for teaching nature lessons, or Hebrew, computers or math classes, or similarly when planning software architecture, she first considers how the intended audience behaves and thinks.
Miriam reports that her work is driven by a desire "to provide clean architectural design and to devise accurate and efficient algorithms." She enjoys creating engaging game play and easily understandable user interfaces. She looks forward to delving into new projects as an IS Architecture Engineer and to collaborating with the Graduate students and Postdocs in the CTSB and ArticuLab.

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Justine Cassell (Communication), CTSB Director, has returned from her sabbatical at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Daniel Diermier (Kellogg), Roderick Swaab (INSTEAD), Mary Kern (Baruch College), and Victoria Husted Medvec (Kellogg) co-wrote "Who Says What to Whom? The Impact of Communication Awareness on Exclusion in Multiparty Negotiations," which will appear in an upcoming issue of Social Cognition.

Lance Fortnow (EECS) set a record for the most downloads for his Communications of the ACM cover story, "The Status of the P versus NP Problem."

Steven Franconeri (Cognitive Psychology), Doug Bemis (Harvard), and George Alvarez (Harvard) co-authored "Number estimation relies on a set of segmented objects" for the August issue of Cognition.

Aggelos Katsaggelos (EECS) gave a keynote talk on "Current Advances on Video Transmission" at the 13th WSEAS Multiconference in Rodos Island, Greece, in July.

Bryan Pardo (EECS) and Ben Duane (Music Theory and Cognition) co-wrote "Streaming from MIDI using constraint satisfaction optimization and sequence alignment," which they presented at the Proceedings of the 2009 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2009) in Montreal, Quebec in August.

Funding Opportunities

Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities.

NSF Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE)

The Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE) program seeks to advance research at the frontiers of STEM learning, education, and evaluation, and to provide the foundational knowledge necessary to improve STEM teaching and learning at all educational levels and in all settings. This solicitation calls for four types of proposals: Pathways, Knowledge Diffusion, Empirical Research, and Large Empirical Research.

The goals of the REESE program are: (1) to catalyze discovery and innovation at the frontiers of STEM learning, education, and evaluation; (2) to stimulate the field to produce high quality and robust research results through the progress of theory, method, and human resources; and (3) to coordinate and transform advances in education, learning research, and evaluation. REESE pursues its mission by developing an interdisciplinary research portfolio focusing on core scientific questions about STEM learning in current and emerging learning contexts, both formal and informal, from childhood through adulthood, and from before school through to graduate school and beyond into the workforce.
REESE places particular importance upon the involvement of young investigators in the projects, at doctoral, postdoctoral, and early career stages, as well as the involvement of STEM disciplinary experts. In addition, research questions related to educational research methodology and evaluation are central to the REESE activity. Proposals due November 12, 2009.

Organization for Autism Research

The Organization for Autism Research (OAR) seeks applied research proposals for its 2010 Autism Applied Research Competition. Through this competition, OAR intends to promote evidence based practices delivered from research in the following areas: the analysis, evaluation, or comparison of current models of assessment, intervention, or systems of service delivery including policy analysis; applied aspects of educational, behavioral, or social/communicative intervention across the lifespan; adult issues such as continuing education, employment, residential supports, sexuality instruction, quality-of-life determinants, and "later intervention"; and issues related to family support, social and community integration, assessment and intervention with challenging behavior, and the use of technology in support of learners with ASD.
OAR seeks to fund studies of one to two years in length that will likely produce practical and clearly objective results that promise some direct benefit for learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), their families, and related service providers (e.g., teachers, classroom aides, job coaches, speech pathologists, psychologists, etc.) at different times in their lives. Proposal deadline is April 2, 2010.

IBM PhD Fellowship Award

Students must be nominated by a faculty member. They must be enrolled full-time in a college or university Ph.D. program, and they must have completed at least one year of study in their doctoral program at the time of their nomination. Award Recipients will be selected based on their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of IBM, and their academic progress to-date, as evidenced by publications and endorsements from their faculty advisor and department head. While students may accept other supplemental fellowships, to be eligible for the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award they may not accept a major fellowship in addition to the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship.

CTSB Exploration Grants

We encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. Please contact Chris Riesbeck c-riesbeck@northwestern.edu for further details.

Conference Submission Deadlines

IWSLT 2009 6th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation in Tokyo, Japan. Submissions due September 18, 2009.

First International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-based Machine Translation in Alacant, Spain. Submissions due September 25, 2009.

ALAS09 2009 Australian Language and Speech Conference in Sydney, Australia. Papers due September 28, 2009.

Interacting with Intelligent Virtual Characters in Sydney, Australia. Papers due September 28, 2009.

ALTA in Sydney, Australia. Papers due September 28, 2009.

HCSNet Workshop on Interacting with Intelligent Virtual Characters in Sydney, Australia. Submissions due September 28, 2009.

Building the Australian National Corpus: Data Sources and Tools in Sydney, Australia. Submissions due September 28, 2009.

Methodological Advances in Corpus-Based Translation Studies in Flanders, Belgium. Papers due September 30, 2009.

UICM3 Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models III in Brussels, Belgium. Papers due October 1, 2009.

ECIR 2010 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. Submissions due October 1, 2009.

Evolang8 The Evolution of Language in Utrecht, Netherlands. Submissions due October 2, 2009.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue in London, United Kingdom (September 11-12, 2009).

TSD 2009 An International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE in Plzen, Czech Republic (September 13-18, 2009).

RANLP-09 Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2009 in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 14-18, 2009).

ICANN 2009 19th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in Limassol, Cyprus (September 14-17, 2009).

IVA'09 Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents in Amsterdam, Netherland (September 14-16, 2009).

Biomedical Information Extraction in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 14-16, 2009).

Fourth Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments in Bonn, Germany (September 15, 2009).

MME'09 Measuring Mobile Emotions: Measuring the Impossible? in Bonn, Germany (September 15, 2009).

Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona, Spain (September 17-18, 2009).

GL2009 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon in Pisa, Italy (September 17-19, 2009).

eETTs Events in Emerging Text Types in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 17-18, 2009).

Between Chunking and Deep Parsing in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 17, 2009).

Workshop on Natural Language Processing methods and corpora in translation, lexicography, and language learning in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 17-18, 2009).

RANLP 2009 1st Workshop on Definition Extraction in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 18, 2009).

eETTs Events in Emerging Text Types in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 18, 2009).

International Conference on Neurobilingualism in Borovets, Bulgaria (September 19-20, 2009).

LPTS09 Linguistic & Psycholinguistic Approaches to Text Structuring in Paris, France (September 21-23, 2009).

Mobile Applications for Communication Disorders in Melbourne, Australia (September 21, 2009).

GAC2009 Grammar and Corpora: 3rd International Conference in Mannheim, Germany (September 22-24, 2009).

The 12th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation in Hamburg, Germany (September 22-23, 2009).

Communication, Cognition and Media in Braga, Portugal (September 23-25, 2009).

GESPIN 2009 Gesture and Speech in Interaction in Poznan, Poland (September 24-26, 2009).

1st Symposium in Applied Sign Linguistics: Sign Language Learning and Teaching in Bristol, United Kingdom (September 24-26, 2009).

HCSNet Workshop on Movement and Motion Capture in Sydney, Australia (September 25-26, 2009).

SIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING in Bristol, United Kingdom (September 26, 2009).

Workshop on Games, Dialogue and Interaction in Paris, France (September 28-30, 2009).

ASCS2009 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science 2009 in Sydney, Australia (September 30-October 2, 2009).

28th Conference on Lexis and Grammar in Bergen, Norway (September 30-October 3, 2009).

UIMA Unstructured Information Management Architecture in Potsdam, Germany (September 30, 2009).

Usability Aspects of Hypermedia Systems in Potsdam, Germany (October 1, 2009).

CLASP Conference on Culture, Language and Social Practice in Boulder, Colorado (October 2-4, 2009).

Reading Groups

If you would like to advertise a reading group, write ctsb@northwestern.edu to let us know.

Employment Opportunities

The CTSB and Articulab are looking for an Associate IS Architecture Engineer who will act as a project manager creating architecture specifications and timelines, server administration, web application development, and occasional desktop support. Specific responsibilities include: developing research software, providing server/user administration, providing desktop support, managing undergraduate developers, facilitating experiments including researching and ordering A/V equipment, performing related duties as required or assigned. Please visit http://www.northwestern.edu/hr/jobs/ for the complete job position (posting #14939) and to apply (click on Academic/Administrative Jobs). Contact John Borland with any questions at j-borland@northwestern.edu.

If you would like to advertise job openings within your research group or lab, please e-mail l-lumley@northwestern.edu, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required.

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