Vol. 8, Issue 3 () - ISI - Information Sciences Institute

The InSiDer
Volume 8, Issue 3
July 24, 2003
A Quarterly Publication of the Intelligent Systems Division
ISD’s Jeff Rickel Passes Away
different countries, Jeff was an inspiration for all of us working in Educational
Synthetic Characters." — Ana Paiva, INESC, Lisbon.
"Jeff was one of the leaders in a community of researchers connecting AI
techniques to computer graphics human
models—so called 'embodied agents.'
His work was seminal, and he was a rising star in this community. He will be
sorely missed." —Norm Badler, University of Pennsylvania.
"Jeff Rickel was an admirable researcher and wonderful person to discuss with." —Catherine Pelachaud, University of Paris 8.
Randy Hill is collecting a digital scrapbook of images of Jeff. If you have any
that you would like to contribute, please
let Kathy Kurinsky <[email protected]>
or Randy <[email protected]> know.
By Lewis Johnson
Our friend and colleague Jeff Rickel died
on Sunday, July 6 from complications of
cancer. He was 40 years old. All of ISD
is saddened by this loss.
Jeff was first diagnosed with lung cancer in the middle of last year. At that
time, the cancer was already in a very
advanced state, and the prospects for
his survival were poor. Nevertheless, he
maintained an upbeat attitude throughout his illness. He did not let cancer
prevent him from pursuing his research
and remained active until the very end.
As a result, his sudden hospitalization
and death were a shock to many in ISD.
Many of Jeff's friends and colleagues
around the world responded with kind
words and offers of support. Following
are just a few of the many comments
that we received:
"Having interacted with Jeff innumerable times, passing through many good
and sometimes fun situations in several
The Jeff Rickel Memorial Library Fund
has been established to support the acquisition of library materials in the area
of artificial intelligence and education.
Please contact Kathy if you wish to
make a donation. We are hopeful that
this will provide ISI with an important
legacy in Jeff's name.
INSIDE:
● Schedule of Events (Page 2)
● New Faces (Page 4)
● New Summer Faces (Page 8)
● Where in ISD??? (Page 10)
● New Research Contracts
(Page 11)
● ISD Publications (Page 11)
● Invited Talks (Page 12)
● Journal Publications 2002-2003
(Page 13)
● New Additions to ISD (Page 15)
● ISD Tidbits (Page 16)
ARTICLES:
● dg.o2003 conference (Page 3)
● Hindi in a Month (Page 5)
● CRUE: Center for Research on
Unexpected Events (Page 5)
● Tactical Language Training
Project (Page 12)
Jeff Rickel had a close personal
relationship with many ISDers. Here,
he is pictured with his daughter
Chelsea, Lewis Johnson, Lewis’ wife
Kim, and Nella the dog.
● AI-Grad Interview with Herb
Schorr (Page 14)
The InSiDer
July 2003
Sun
Mon
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
1
2
3
4 ISI Closed:
5
Independence Day
Aram’s Birthday!
6
7
8
9
10
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13
14
15
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24
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27
28
29
30
31
Amy’s Birthday!
July:
•July 4: ISI Closed: Independence Day
•July 4: Aram Galstyan’s Birthday!
•July 12: Kate LaBore’s Birthday!
•July 20: Amy Sri’s Birthday!
Kate’s Birthday!
August 2003
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
1
2
Philipp’s Birthday!
3
Sat
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
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Jim’s Birthday!
31
Page 2
Jihie’s Birthday!
Alex’s Birthday!
Ranjit’s Birthday!
Mack’s Birthday!
Benham’s
Birthday!
August:
•August 1: Philipp Koehn’s Birthday!
•August 6: Jihie Kim’s Birthday!
•August 10: Jim Blythe’s Birthday!
•August 15: Mack Reed’s Birthday!
•August 19: Alex Fraser’s Birthday!
•August 20: Ranjit Nair’s Birthday!
•August 21: Benham Salemi’s Birthday!
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
September 2003
September:
•September 1: ISI Closed: Labor Day
•September 4: Arda Celebi’s Birthday!
•September 10: Liang Zhou’s Birthday!
•September 12: Kary Lau’s Birthday!
•September 13: Chin-Yew Lin’s Birthday!
•September 17: Harshit Suri’s Birthday!
•September 18: Yigal Aren’s Birthday!
•September 18: Kathy Kurinsky’s Birthday!
•September 21: David Pynadath’s Birthday!
•September 24: Namhee Kwon’s Birthday!
•September 25: Uli Germann’s Birthday!
•September 26: IUI Abstracts Due!
•September 28: Daniel Marcu’s Birthday!
Sun
Mon
1
ISI Closed:
Labor Day
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
2
3
4
5
6
Arda’s Birthday!
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
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20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
David’s Biirthday!
Daniel’s Birthday!
Liang’s Birthday!
Harshit’s Birthday!
Namhee’s
Birthday!
Yigal’s Birthday!
Kathy’s Birthday!
Uli’s Birthday!
Kary’s Birthday!
IUI Abstracts Due!
Chin-Yew’s
Birthday!
dg.o2003: National Conference on Digital Government Research
founder Nicholas Negroponte, the
conference presented a broad, rich
array of the latest multidisciplinary
papers and system demonstrations
from the fast-growing digital government research community.
ISD staff in the Digital Government
Research Center took leading roles in
organizing and presenting dg.o2003
in Boston on May 18-21. The 2003
National Conference on Digital Government Research was the largest
and, by all accounts, the most successful conference in the 4-year history of the National Science Foundation's Digital Government Program.
Keynoted by
MIT
Media Lab co-
Conference co-chairs Yigal Arens and
Eduard Hovy collaborated with NSF/
Digital Government Program Manager
Valerie Gregg and Program Chair
Peggy Agouris (University of Maine)
to schedule more than 20 paper
presentation sessions, panel discussions, live system demonstrations
and "birds-of-a-feather" meetings
that drew nearly 200 academic researchers and government IT partners to the Hyatt Hotel, overlooking
Boston Harbor. They also organized
fascinating field trips for the conference audience to the MIT Media Lab,
Harvard University's John F. Kennedy
School of Government, and the Volpe
National Transportation Systems
Center.
ISD's Mack Reed served as Communications Chair, coordinating internal
and external publicity, including the
conference Web site and publishing
the Proceedings, and Kary Lau provided vital admin support before,
during and after registration, which
welcomed attendees from across the
U.S. and abroad.
For coverage of the international participation, system demos and other
dg.o2003 highlights, see the articles
by DGRC writer Gale Holland at
http://www.diggov.org/news/
stories/ .
For more on the Digital Government
Research center, visit
http://www.dgrc.org/ .
For information on the Digital Government program, see
http://www.digitalgovernment.org/ .
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
New Faces
TIM CHKLOVSKI
[email protected]
Hi All,
I'm Timothy (Tim) Chklovski, a new Research Scientist working in Yolanda Gil's
group on Interactive Knowledge Acquisition—I'm interested in making intelligent
(in some cases settling for clever and
useful) systems that gather knowledge
from people. My research interests span
both NLP issues (lexical semantics in
particular) and a variety of Knowledge
Acquisition and Knowledge Representation topics.
I and my wife of 1 year, Tara, come to
ISI and sunny LA (both of which we've
been enjoying lots!) from more climactically challenged Boston. I've spent my
undergrad and grad years there, at MIT,
getting bachelor's degrees in Math and
EECS and an M.Eng and a Ph.D. in EECS
(AI)—the latter with a 2-year interlude
to found and run aQuery, a company
that did a lot of research in document
understanding and presentation of
search results in a navigable fashion.
Originally, I'm from snowy St. Petersburg, Russia (and yes, still fairly fluent
in that complex but phonetic language).
My high school years were spent in
equally snowy Minneapolis, Minnesota,
where I was chasing International Math
Olympiad glory (with some success).
Some of the interactive systems I've
built can be found at:
http://teach-computers.org and
http://www.ai-games.org/paraphrase.
html
KRISTIN GHENT
[email protected]
My name is Kristin Ghent, and I just finished my freshman year at Brigham
Young University in Provo, UT. I am majoring in exercise physiology and hope to
become a physical therapist. My family
lives in Manhattan Beach, and that is
Page 4
currently where I am living for the summer. I love any kind of sport involving a
board, but my passions are snowboarding and wakeboarding. I have come to
ISD to help the administrative staff and
anyone else who needs me, so make
sure to stop by if you need anything!
Tim Chklovski
Room 924
DIMITRA PAPACHRISTOU
[email protected]
Where should I start? Let’s start with
“Geia sou! Me lene Dimitra. Eimai ellinida.” I grew up in the country of
“Hallo! Ich heisse Dimitra. Ich bin
Griechin.” The study abroad program
brought me one year to "Ciao. Mi
chiamo Dimitra. Sono greca." In 1998, I
received my MS degree in Computer Science, and after five years of developing
intelligent software systems for planning
processes at airlines and airports, I arrived in time to work together with Lewis
Johnson on the Tactical Language Project, where "MarHaba. Ismi Dimitra. Ana
yunâniye," will be part of my work. Oh,
did I mention: "Hello. I am Dimitra. I am
Greek."
Kristin Ghent
Room 905
IGNACIO THAYER
[email protected]
I just completed my M.S. in Computer
Science at UCLA. Before that, I received
my B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. At UCLA my thesis research had to
do with methods for multiple sequence
alignment. Here at ISI, I am excited to
be working with Daniel Marcu and Kevin
Knight on the ReWrite project.
I was born in Rio, but I am not Brazilian—my family is from Chile and Panama. I speak Spanish and welcome the
opportunity to practice it. I do like to get
away from the computer occasionally. I
like to hike, backpack, travel, snowboard, lift weights, run, bike and paint. I
am also picking up surfing and kitesurfing. If anyone is ever up for any of
the above, let me know! I also read a
lot, mainly history and non-fiction, but
also the occasional novel.
Dimitra Papachristou
Room 921
Ignacio Thayer
Room 711
Hindi in a Month: Rapid Development of Natural Language Processing Tools for New Languages
By Ulrich Germann
A fool is he who never climbs Mt. Fuji.
A fool is he who climbs it twice.
– Japanese proverb
Throughout the month of June, members of ISI's Natural Language Group
were busy crunching a new challenge: developing Natural Language
Processing tools for Hindi. This effort
was part of a multi-site exercise
sponsored by the DARPA TIDES program, which funds much of the Natural Language Group’s research. The
basic idea was this: One of the objectives of the TIDES program is to foster research that leads to tools that
can be easily adapted to new languages. But except for a small-scale
experiment on Tamil-English machine
translation (MT) in 2000/2001, and a
ten-day dry-run on Cebuano in March
of this year (to figure out procedural
issues), no one had ever tested how
much can really be accomplished in
one month. It was time for the real
test.
DARPA TIDES program manager
Charles Wayne picked a language
from a list compiled by the Linguistic
Data Consortium (LDC) that ranks
languages according to the amount of
language resources found by LDC in
a preliminary study. On June 1, he
announced his choice, and the race
was on. Evaluation data became
available on June 27, and system
output for evaluation was due on
June 30.
At ISI, we decided to focus on three
aspects of the task: machine translation, summarization, and an information processing interface that provides state-of-the-art data space
navigation and multidocument summarization. In addition, we would run
a small-scale translation “sweatshop”
to build a small, high-quality parallel
corpus required for training our MT
system and to monitor MT progress,
as more and more parallel data
would become available during the
course of the exercise. Our data
creation effort resulted in a parallel
corpus of about 1000 Hindi-English
sentence pairs.
(Continued on page 6)
ISI’s New Center for Research on Unexpected Events (CRUE)
By Yigal Arens
Homeland security is one of the
greatest challenges facing the United
States today. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, our nation is redirecting immense resources
towards improving our ability to respond to and recover from terrorist
attacks.
Government agencies already have
significant mechanisms in
place for managing a wide
range of natural and manmade disasters. However, the
kinds of events being contemplated now are different.
Severe new problems arise
when an event occurs that is
completely unexpected: when
it is so rare and damaging
that it outstrips preparations,
plans, and human and material resources.
To address these new challenges, ISI
established last September the Center for Research on Unexpected
Events (CRUE). CRUE is an applied
research center with the mission of
building on revolutionary developments in information technology to
transform the nation’s ability to respond to unexpected events. What
distinguishes CRUE’s focus from more
common emergency response is that
CRUE concentrates on high-impact
events that are unplanned for, or
that outstrip existing preparations
and plans. Such events are rare, but
are bound to occur. While by definition it is not possible to have detailed
preparations for them, CRUE emphasizes work on policies, general resources and support technologies
that will apply in any extreme eventuality.
An insightful fortune found in a cookie
CRUE builds on ISI’s extensive relevant body of research in information
technology, as well as on contacts
with social scientists and engineers
elsewhere at USC and at other institutions. CRUE will also build on collaborations with government agencies and first responders.
Researchers from ISI and other institutions working together under CRUE
have recently submitted a variety of
proposals for homeland security-
related research. Topics proposed
were as diverse as vehicle monitoring, reasoning and link discovery,
emergency evacuation of urban regions, computer network security,
decision-making environments, sensor networks, and delivery of education and training relevant to homeland security.
CRUE has been working with US government agencies and officials to create an understanding of the
research issues underlying
handling unexpected events
and the mechanisms for conducting such work. In February 2002 at NSF’s request,
Paul Rosenbloom and I organized a workshop on
“Responding to the Unexpected.” CRUE was recently
involved in organizing a follow-up workshop to further
identify the scope and possible modalities for a national research program on the subject.
CRUE is currently headed by me with
the collaboration of John Damoulakis
from ISI East. Paul Rosenbloom has
been working very closely with us.
When Paul Cohen joins us in September (see announcement on page 15),
he will take over the leadership of
CRUE. I will continue working with
Paul on CRUE at least initially.
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
Hindi in a Month, continued
The tool lets you open individual documents in the original
Hindi, or the machinetranslated version of it.
When you click on a sphere or the document entry in
one of the side bars, the sphere or the document entry
and its counterpart are highlighted, so that you know
which document corresponds to which sphere and vice
versa.
tions back to the submitter,
and through a TCP socket that
could be accessed by other
programs.
Obviously, machine translation
plays a pivotal role in multilingual information processing.
At some point, you have to
cross the language boundaries, no matter in which language you search, summarize,
cluster, or process otherwise.
Within the surprise language
exercise, ISI took on the pivotal role of providing MT to
the rest of the community. We
provided bulk translations of
large document collections to
other participating sites (most
notably the University of
Maryland) and offered MT as a
service via the web, both
through a web submission
form and a TCP socket. Two
outside systems, Hindi question answering at New York
University, and Breck Baldwin's aliasi, a company working on crossdocument co-reference, made use of
tems were available as soon as they
had been built, through both a web
As for MT, we had the first system for
interface that would mail the translaHindi “up and running” in less than
24 hours after the
language had been
Each sphere represents one document.
announced. Not that
The distance between the spheres reHindi translations of English
it was of much
flects their similarity or dissimilarity.
search terms (from dictionary).
use — it could only
Query
can
be
in
English
or
in
Hindi.
translate the bible,
since all the training
data we had was the
bible, and the version of the Hindi biDocument clusters.
ble that we had
comes in an encoding that is used for
the bible and nothing but the bible.
Nevertheless,
it
proved the point:
Give us the data,
and we'll have MT
ready for you in less
than a day (or two
or three, if you give
us lots of data). As
more and more parallel data became
available throughout
June, we continued
to build new and improved versions of
the MT system. AlCluster labels created on the fly
using Liang Zhou’s multidocument
most all of our sys(Continued from page 5)
headline generation.
Page 6
Hindi in a Month, continued
this socket to include ISI MT in their
Hindi demo systems.
Franz Och as our local MT czar, Rahul
Bhagat as the tireless data shuffler
(who kept feeding the system with
new data), and Lei Ding as the author of the MT web interface deserve
special recognition for their contributions to this success.
In the area of summarization, ChinYew Lin adapted Infosqueeze's single-document summarization engine
to handle Hindi and then plugged in
ISI MT to provide English versions of
the Hindi summaries (Infosqueeze.
com is a company co-founded by
Eduard Hovy and Chin-Yew Lin). Liang Zhou put together multidocument headline generation (which, in
a nutshell, puts labels on document
clusters to give you a rough idea of
what they are about) for both Hindi
and English. Finally, Anton Leuski
integrated Liang's headline generation into his document clustering and
document space navigation tool,
Lighthouse, and integrated Lighthouse with iNeATS (a joint work by
Anton Leuski, Chin-Yew-Lin and Eduard Hovy). The graphics in this article
show the tool in action.
single web site uses its own, idiosyncratic encoding scheme, so getting
the data wasn't enough — it also
needed to be standardized. We tried
to stay out of that mess as much as
possible and left it to other sites to
tackle the problem. In spite of the
problems, after one month, people
were able to retrieve, translate, and
summarize Hindi documents into
English. This was absolutely unthinkable five years ago.
Josef Och, Deepak Ravichandran, and
Liang Zhou.
Special thanks to Doug Oard, who, as
University of Maryland's envoy to ISI,
turned out to be the driving force behind much that went on at ISI during
this exercise. His insistence that we
make available to others whatever
we produced sooner rather than later
helped position ISI in a prominent
position during the exercise.
The following people at ISI were involved in the surprise language exercise: Rahul Bhagat, Tara Chklovski,
Lei Ding, Ulrich Germann, Eduard
Hovy, Ashish Jain, Kevin Knight, Anton Leuski, Chin-Yew Lin, Daniel
Marcu, Linda Mizushima, Kiran Meduri, Anish Nair, Doug Oard, Franz
You can adjust summarization
parameters (length of summary,
number of sentences per document
considered, etc.).
Multidocument summary via sentence extraction. Sentences are
ordered chronologically (based on document time stamp). The
source document of each sentence is indicated by the choice of
colors (cf. the thumbnails on the bottom left).
Automatically created subtopics
(topic signatures) let you tune the
multidocument summary to your
specific interest. The summary is
regenerated on the fly.
The single-document pane. Clicking on a sentence in the
multi-document summary displays the corresponding
document in this pane. The intensity of the print reflects
the relative importance of the text. Important sentences
stick out, unimportant ones fade away. The relevance
threshold can be adjusted dynamically with the slider on
the top of the pane.
All in all, the surprise language experiment gave us an incentive to put
together various components that we
developed at ISI over the past years
and to get them to work with one another.
So what were the challenges, and
what did we accomplish in this
month? The good news is that we accomplished many of our objectives.
We were able to adapt both our MT
and our summarization technology
quickly to handle Hindi, and based on
our experience with Hindi, plugging
in new languages won't be much of a
challenge. The big drawback, in particular with respect to MT, is the dependence on good, parallel data. Obtaining such data is a tedious and
fairly boring process, and the Hindi
exercise has shown that again (like
we already saw in French, Chinese,
Arabic, Tamil, and Cebuano). In the
case of Hindi, the situation is even
worse than what we encountered
with other languages. Almost every
Locations mentioned in the text, as identified via a third-party component, the BBN
IdentiFinder, are plotted on a map with another third-party component, Geotools. The
histograms to the left of the location name reflect on the term occurrences in the
various documents
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
Beata Beigman-Klebanov
Mattijs Ghijsen
Summer Faces
BEATA BEIGMAN-KLEBANOV
[email protected]
Room 948
EDWARD KIM
[email protected]
Room 959
Shalom to you all out there! I'm a 2nd year
Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, having come here for the summer to
work with Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu on a
project related to question answering. Summer
internships are a great way of meeting people
with similar professional interests and working
together, and it's been fun so far!
Hi, my name is Edward, and I’m currently an
undergrad at USC. I am a senior, majoring in
computer science and will be graduating next
spring, in 2004. I'm currently working on the
DOCKER system at ISI, and my general task is
to improve and build upon the current system
that we have running. When I'm not at work, I
usually spend my time writing, playing sports or
volunteering my time to church, and of course
spend time with friends too! :) I'm always open
to make new friends or meet new people, so
feel free to drop by my office or say hi if you
see me pass by.
MATTIJS GHIJSEN
[email protected]
Room 950
Matthew Ho
Mark Hopkins
I am a summer student from the University of
Twente (the Netherlands). I am working with
Lewis Johnson on the Social Intelligence project, and my main task is to work on polite language generation. Since I first learned about
embodied conversational agents, I have been
fascinated by them. Actually, the first example I
saw was STEVE, so when I later got the opportunity to spend the summer here at ISI, I didn’t
have to think twice. Now I am halfway through
the internship, and until now it has been a
really great experience for me.
MATTHEW HO
[email protected]
Room 943
Edward Kim
John Lee
Anish Nair
Tatsuya Oiye
Page 8
JOHN LEE
[email protected]
Room 948
John Lee is a graduate student in the Spoken
Language Systems group at MIT. He is spending this summer with Tim Chklovski and
Yolanda Gil in the Interactive Knowledge Capture group, working on the natural language
processing aspects of the Trellis project.
ANISH NAIR
[email protected]
Room 958
I'm Matthew Ho, currently a graduate student
at USC, and am working here for Craig
Knoblock on a project that simulates train
movement by retrieving and integrating information from the Web. I look forward to knowing
more people from ISD, and if you are interested
in Hong Kong or my project here, feel free to
talk to me.
I'm in the Master's program in Computer Science at USC. I came to ISI this summer from
down the street (ICT), where I was working on
language representations of commonsense concepts. I'll be dealing with natural language
problems like decipherment, dialog, etc. with
Kevin Knight. Research interests include machine translation, corpus linguistics and knowledge representation.
MARK HOPKINS
[email protected]
Room 962
TATSUYA OIYE
[email protected]
Room 949
Mark Hopkins is visiting ISI this summer as a
research assistant, working with Kevin Knight
and Daniel Marcu on syntactic approaches to
machine translation. Mark has just completed
the third year of the Ph.D. program in computer
science at UCLA under the advising of Professor
Judea Pearl. His research focuses on causal and
probabilistic representation and reasoning.
I am a senior Computer Science major at Harvey Mudd College, specializing in Software Development and Graphics. I am working at ISI
under Professor Johnson on the Tactical Language Project, as a level designer and interface
developer. I like anime and to Lindy Hop in my
free time.
NISHIT RATHOD
[email protected]
Room 960
KEITH STEVENS
[email protected]
Room 949
I'm Nishit Rathod, a student at USC, completing an MS in Computer Science. The funny part
is that I started with a focus on Computer Networks (soon I'll be switching to general CS),
having taken two Systems courses in my first
semester (Fall 2002). But things changed when
I sat in for a CSCI 562 class (Kevin's course) in
the Spring. I was fascinated and started working with Kevin on a Decipherment project and
have been working on it since. Automatic Character-Code Conversion is what we are working
on right now.
I am working for the summer with Dr. Lewis
Johnson on the Tactical Language project. I'll
be working with Tatsuya Oiye to modify the Unreal Tournament 2003 game engine to create a
tactical language training scenario. I am an
undergraduate Computer Science major at Harvey Mudd College.
SID SHAW
[email protected]
Room 951
Hi, my name is Lara Taylor. I'm here for the
summer, working with Kevin Knight and Daniel
Marcu on modeling discourse coherence. I'm
visiting here from UC-San Diego, where I'm
working on my Ph.D. in the linguistics department. You can find out more about me by visiting my website at http://ling.ucsd.edu/~ltaylor.
Hi there! This is Siddharth (Sid) Shaw. I am a
graduate student studying Computer Science
(Software Engineering and AI) at the University
of Southern California (USC). I also did my
bachelors at USC in Computer Engineering and
Computer Science. I was born and bought up in
Kuwait and hence the love for Soccer. Apart
from soccer, school and work, I can usually be
found near happy hours or some Unreal Tournament server or both. I have worked for several corporate companies during my undergrad
years and have to admit that I am very impressed by the work atmosphere at ISI. The
fine location doesn’t hurt either. At ISI, I am
working for Yolanda Gil and Jihie Kim in the iKnowledge-Capture group. I can be found in
951, so feel free to drop by for some soccer
news, happy hour hang outs, gulf war stories,
information about CS at USC, gaming or just
information about my project and what I’m doing at ISI.
VON-WUN SOO
[email protected]
Room 950
Hi! my name is Von-Wun Soo. I am a professor
from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. I
am working with Lewis Johnson on Intelligent
Agents. I brought my family (my wife and three
kids) with me for the summer. Perhaps I should
spend more time with them at Disneyland, Universal Studios, the beaches, etc. rather than
staying at ISI.
LARA TAYLOR
[email protected]
Room 948
Nishit Rathod
Sid Shaw
Von-Wun Soo
DAN WU
[email protected]
Room 951
I am pursuing my Ph.D. degree at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am here at ISI
for a 3-month internship.
Here at ISI, I am
working with Jim Blythe on task composition in
the computational grid environment. This topic
is very interesting and is very related to my
Ph.D. work.
FAN YANG
[email protected]
Room 949
Happy to be in Los Angeles. I am a second-year
Ph.D. student in the Oregon Graduate Institute
at the Oregon Health & Science University. I
am here as a summer student working with
Prof. Lewis Johnson on the ESPEECH project.
My research interests include speech and language processing (http://www.cse.ogi.edu/
~yangf).
Keith Stevens
Lara Taylor
Dan Wu
RONGGANG YU
[email protected]
Room 951
I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas
at Austin, and came here to do a summer internship. My research advisors are Jim Blythe
and Yolanda Gil. My project is about investigating applications of planning and knowledge representation for the computational Grid.
Fan Yang
Ronggang Yu
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
Where in ISD???
Fun in the Sun!
The weather is heating up, and ISDers are dreaming of the beach.
Have you seen these summery items floating around the offices here at ISI?
See if you can figure out where you’ve seen these.
Stumped? The answers are on page 16.
Page 10
Object 1
Object 2
Object 3
Object 4
Research Contracts in ISD
•Congratulations to Ed Hovy, who received an NSF contract for his project,
titled, “A Testbed for eRulemaking
Data” (eRule-BEER).
When Congress passes a law, that's
only the beginning. Government personnel in the appropriate agency write
a collection of rules (called Regulations) to spell out the law's details as
specifically as needs to be. This process takes a lot of time and expertise.
Also, it takes input from the country:
during the regulation writing process,
by law, the writers have to make
available the draft and have to read
each comment that is returned to
them by the US citizenry (whether it's
an email message from a pressure
group of thousands, or a thousandpage book from a large corporation
with an interest).
The funded contract is to perform a
small amount of research to explore
the feasibility of using Natural Language technology to help at various
stages of the rule-writing process: to
find relevant information and other
rules, to classify and summarize people's comments, and to collect and record the effects of the rules (court
cases, subsequent laws, etc.). This
project is joint with language technology researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University and social science/policy
researchers at Drake and San Francisco Universities.
•Congratulations to Yigal Arens, who
received an NSF contract for his project, titled, “Digital Government Community
Building
and
Outreach” (DGO2).
This grant is for a continuation of previous community building and outreach work that ISI has been doing on
behalf of the NSF's Digital Government
Program.
The new grant supports building a new
website and online toolset for the
growing nationwide digital government
r e s e a r c h c o m m u n it y a t w w w .
digitalgovernment.org; publishing the
monthly dgOnline newsletter;
retooling ISI's Digital Government Research Center's website; and organizing the 2003 annual National Conference on Digital Government Research,
including handling publicity, organizational communication and print and
multimedia publications for it.
•Congratulations to Lewis Johnson,
who received an ONR contract for his
project, titled, “Rapid Development of
Mission-Oriented Communication
Skills” (RapidLang).
The objective of this project is to develop tools to support individualized
language learning, and to apply them
to the acquisition of tactical languages: subsets of linguistic, gestural,
and cultural knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish specific missions.
In order to maximize learner motivation and give learners effective practice opportunities, learners will practice on acquiring vocabulary items and
recognizing gestures and then apply
them in simulated missions,
where they interact with avatars and
virtual characters. The training
system enables learners to communicate directly with on-screen characters
using a speech input interface. Our objective is to make the toolset easily
applied to new tactical languages, missions, and training contexts. Our first
target language is Levantine Arabic.
•Congratulations to Stefan Decker,
who received a DARPA contract for his
project, titled, “Enabling Intelligent
Agents on the Web” (OnTo-Agents).
The goal of OnTo-Agents is to establish an agent infrastructure for the
Semantic Web, based on metadata
and ontology standards developed by
the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C). Ontoagents will develop scalable storing, querying, and reasoning
infrastructure for DAML+OIL/OWL ontologies, reasoning techniques for handling multiple modeling languages (like
ER, UML, TopicMaps), components for
ontology based service discovery for
Semantic Web services, and tools for
the creation of annotation of services.
The project is a collaboration between
ISI, Stanford University and the University of Karlsruhe.
ISD Publications
Timothy Chklovski. "Learner: A
System for Acquiring Commonsense
Knowledge by Analogy." Second International Conference on Knowledge
Capture (K-CAP) (To appear 2003).
“Exploiting a Search Engine to Develop More Flexible Web Agents.”
Proceedings of IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2003) (To appear 2003).
Timothy Chklovski and Rada Mihalcea. "Exploiting Agreement and Disagreement of Human Annotators for
Wor d Sens e D isa m big ua tion ."
Recent Advances in Natural Language
Processing (RANLP) (To appear
2003).
Mike Pool, Ken Murray, Julie Fitzgerald, Mala Mehrotra, Robert Schrag,
Jim Blythe, Jihie Kim, Hans
Chalupsky, Pierluigi Miraglia, Thomas
Russ & Dave Schneider.
“Evaluating SME-Authored COA Critiquing Knowledge.” Second International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP) (To appear 2003).
Shou-de Lin and Craig Knoblock.
Come
One!
Come
All!
THE ISD
RETREAT
Our bi-annual ISD retreat is quickly
approaching! It will be
held November 6 & 7, 2003
at the Lake Arrowhead Resort.
Contact Wei-Min Shen
or Ulf Hermjakob
with any comments
or suggestions.
http://ai.isi.edu/retreat
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
Tactical Language Training Project
By Lewis Johnson
Military
and
civilian personnel are frequently
assigned
missions that require them to
communicate
effectively with
speakers
of
other
languages. They,
thus, require knowledge of the local
culture, language and norms of faceto-face communication.
Machine
translation tools can help, but are not
a substitute for knowledge of culture
and language. Unfortunately, adult
learners often find it difficult to acquire even a rudimentary working
knowledge of a foreign language. The
ability of a learner to master these
skills depends on their individual
background, aptitude and motivation.
The objective of this project is to develop tools to support individualized
language learning and to apply them
to the acquisition of tactical lan-
guages: subsets of linguistic, gestural
and cultural knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish specific missions. In order to maximize learner
motivation and to give learners effective practice opportunities, learners
will practice acquiring vocabulary
items and recognizing gestures and
then apply them in simulated missions, where they interact with avatars and virtual characters. The training system enables learners to communicate directly with on-screen
characters using a speech input interface. Our objective is to make the
toolset easily applicable to new tactical languages, missions and training
contexts.
matically based on learner performance.
Our planned technical solution includes the following components:
● Tools for training natural language
processing tools rapidly on new tactical languages, from example scenarios.
● A computer-based language training
system for multiple Middle Eastern
languages, employing pedagogical
agents, virtual humans, and game
elements.
● An authoring tool that facilitates the
creation of specialized language exercises and curricula, sequenced auto-
● Techniques for immediate detection
of speaker dysfluencies and other
problems requiring feedback and
remediation.
● Tools for tracking learner focus of
attention, fatigue, and effort, employing vision techniques, and for inferring learner motivation.
● Software for managing interactive
mission scenarios, and for controlling
the behavior of animated characters
within those scenarios, in order to
promote learning goals.
This work is a collaboration between
CARTE, the Natural Language Group,
speech and vision researchers at ISI
and on campus, and language learning tool developers at Micro Analysis
and Design.
Invited Talks
Speaker:
Lewis Johnson
Invited talk at:
AAMAS 2003 (The Second International Joint Conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems)
practical value in promoting learner motivation and engagement. Finally I will discuss efforts to enable agents to
act in a dramatic sense—to portray roles and to convey
emotion. This is an essential part of human social interaction, which often involves the portrayal of roles. And the
application of theatrical principles to agent behavior results in agent behavior that is more consistent and understandable, and user experiences that are more engaging.
Title:
Synthetic Agents as Social Actors
Abstract:
Social psychologists such as Reeves and Nass have argued
that people tend to relate to media much as they relate to
human beings. Animated synthetic agents have been developed to exploit this tendency. Such agents raise expectations that they can function as social actors—able to engage in social interactions with people and other agents.
This presentation will describe efforts at enabling synthetic
agents, particularly pedagogical agents, to interact in a
manner that is sensitive to social expectations and conventions. The social intelligence that this requires is of
Page 12
Speaker:
Lewis Johnson
Invited talk at:
AIEd 2003 (The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education)
Lewis has been asked to give an invited talk at AIEd 2003,
in part to honor Jeff Rickel and in part to talk about other
research at CARTE.
ISD Journal Publications (2002–03)
Jafar Adibi & Christos Faloutsos.
"Workshop Report: Fractal Dimensions
and Self-Similarity in Data Mining: Current Techniques and Future Challenges."
SIGKDD Explorations 4.2 (2002): 115117.
David N. Allsopp, Patrick Beautement,
Michael Kirton, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,
Niranjan Suri, Edmund H. Durfee, Craig
A. Knoblock, Austin Tate & Craig W.
Thompson. “Coalition agents experiment: Multiagent cooperation in international coalitions.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 17.3 (2002): 26-35.
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Ulrich Germann,
Ulf Hermjakob, Kevin Knight, Philipp
Koehn, Daniel Marcu & Kenji Yamada. "Translation with Scarce Bilingual
Resources." Machine Translation (2003).
Jill Burstein & Daniel Marcu. “A Machine Learning Approach for Identification Thesis and Conclusion Statements
in Student Essays.” Computers and the
Humanities (Chum) (To appear 2003).
Jill Burstein, Daniel Marcu, and Kevin
Knight. "Finding the WRITE Stuff: Automatic Identification of Discourse Structure in Student Essays." IEEE Intelligent
Systems 18.1 (2003): 32-39.
Geraldine Clarebout, Jan Elen, W. Lewis
Johnson & Erin Shaw. “Pedagogical
agents: an opportunity to be grasped?”
Journal of Educational Multimedia and
Hypermedia 11.3 (2002): 267-286.
Ewa Deelman, Jim Blythe, Yolanda
Gil, Carl Kesselman, Gaurang Mehta,
Karan Vahi, Albert Lazzarini, Adam Arbree, Richard Cavanaugh & Scott
Koranda. “Mapping Abstract Complex
Workflows onto Grid Environments”
Journal of Grid Computing 1.1 (To appear 2003).
Maged Dessouky, Jeff Rickel, & Narayanan Sadagopan.
“An Agent-based
Learning Approach for Teaching the Relationship Between Lot Size and Cycle
Time.” INFORMS Transactions on Education 3.1 (2002).
mada. "Fast Decoding and Optimal Decoding for Machine Translation." Artificial
Intelligence (To appear 2003).
nance: A Machine Learning Approach.”
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
(JAIR) 18 (2003): 149-181.
Jonathan Gratch & Stacy Marsella.
“Fight the Way You Train: The Role and
Limits of Emotions in Training for Combat .” Brown Journal of World Affairs
10.1 (2003): 63-75.
Ranjit Nair, Milind Tambe,
Stacy
Marsella & Taylor Raines. "Automated
Assistants to Analyze Team Behavior."
Journal of Automated Agents and Multiagent Systems (To appear 2003).
Jonathan Gratch, Jeff Rickel, Elisabeth
Andre, Norman Badler, Justine Cassell &
Eric Petajan. “Creating Interactive Virtual Humans: Some Assembly Required.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 17.4
(2002): 54-63.
Franz Josef Och & Hermann Ney. "A
Systematic Cmparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models." Computational
Linguistics 29.1 (2003): 19-51.
Jerry Hobbs. "Information Extraction
from Biomedical Text." Journal of Biomedical Informatics (To appear).
Jerry Hobbs and Srini Narayanan.
"Spatial Representation and Reasoning."
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
(2002).
Eduard Hovy. “Using an Ontology to
Simplify Data Access.” Communications
of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) (January 2003).
Eduard Hovy, Maghi King & Andrei
Popescu-Belis. “Customizing Machine
Translation Evaluation.” Machine Translation (To appear 2003).
Gal Kaminka, David Pynadath & Milind Tambe. "Monitoring Teams by
Overhearing: A Multi-Agent PlanRecognition Approach." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 17
(2002): 83-135.
Kevin Knight & Daniel Marcu.
"Summarization Beyond Sentence Extraction: A Probabilistic Approach to
Sentence Compression." Artificial Intelligence 139.1 (2002): 91-107.
Latifur Khan, Dennis McLeod & Eduard
Hovy. "Retrieval Effectiveness of an Ontology-Based Model for Information Selection." Journal for Very Large Data
Bases (VLDB) (To appear).
Aram Galstyan & Kristina Lerman.
“Adaptive Boolean Networks and Minority Games with Time-Dependent Capacities.'' Physical Review E 66 (2002):
015103.
Kristina Lerman & Aram Galstyan.
“Mathematical Model of Foraging in a
Group of Robots: Effect of Interference.”
Autonomous Robots 13.2 (2002): 127141.
Ulrich Germann, Michael Jahr, Kevin
Knight, Daniel Marcu & Kenji Ya-
Kristina Lerman, Steven Minton &
Craig Knoblock. “Wrapper Mainte-
David Pynadath & Milind Tambe.
"The Communicative Multiagent Team
Decision Problem: Analyzing Teamwork
Theories and Models." Journal of Artificial Intelligent Research
(JAIR)
16
(2003): 389-423.
Jeff Rickel, Stacy Marsella, Jonathan
Gratch, Randy Hill, David Traum & Bill
Swartout. “Toward a New Generation of
Virtual Humans for Interactive Experiences.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 17.4
(2002): 32-38.
Paul Scerri, David Pynadath & Milind
Tambe. "Towards Adjustable Autonomy
for the Real World." Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research (JAIR) 17 (2003):
171-228.
Wei-Min Shen, Behnam Salemi & Peter Will.
“Hormone-Inspired Ad-aptive
Communication and Distributed Control
for CONRO Self-Reconfigurable Robots.”
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 18.5 (2002): 700-712.
Wei-Min Shen, Peter Will & Berok
Khoshnevis. “Autonomous Docking in
Self-Reconfigurable Robots.” IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics (To appear
2003).
Wei-Min Shen & Mark Yim. “SelfReconfigurable Robots.” IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics 7.4 (2002): 401402.
Kasper Stoy, Wei-Min Shen & Peter
Will. “Using Role-Based Control to Produce Locomotion in Chain-type SelfReconfigurable Robots.” IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics 7.4 (2002): 410417.
Volume 8, Issue 3
The InSiDer
Questions for Herb Schorr, Executive Director of ISI
A Conversation with Graduate Student Jay Modi
ing for me, which is
hard to do. I still
haven't quite figured
out what happened
there. I think it was
because the guy I
worked for was a
lousy manager.
Jay: Is that why you
decided
to
focus
your career on research management
instead of staying in
academia?
Herb: I was always
interested in systems. Back then, and
still today, that was
not the easiest way
to get tenure. You
needed to write four
papers a year, and I
was doing that, but
not on the topics I
liked. So I guess one
piece of advice would
Jay Modi with Herb Schorr. Jay was awarded a
be to make sure to
Meritous Service Award in June, for his dedicated
get your teeth into
work as the organizer of the AI-Grads Group.
something you really
like and have talent
Jay: Many of the people here at ISI
for. That's a rather trivial piece of adhave probably never met you. Would
vice, but important.
you like to take this opportunity to
say anything?
Jay: Perhaps arguably one of your
greatest accomplishments was as one
Herb: I've met almost all the permaof the fathers of the RISC computer
nent staff. That’s one thing I do religarchitecture. Could you tell me more
iously. My feeling about the proper
about how that came about?
way to run a research institution is
that you don't want layoffs. It’s bad
Herb: The RISC architecture was defor morale. So I want to meet everyveloped at IBM between 1965 and
one, make sure they are good for the
1968. Again, it happened very quickly
institution.
once I came to IBM that I started
having people work for me, and I beJay: You've had a long and very succame the manager of the RISC
cessful career: Ph.D. in Electrical Enarchitecture. While at Yorktown, I
gineering from Princeton, Postdocwrote the principles of architecture
toral Fellow at Cambridge University,
manual, and then I ran the ArchitecAssistant Professor at Columbia Uniture Department and later, Architecversity, Vice President of Research at
ture and Programming. During that
IBM and now Executive Director of
time, I co-invented a lot of the RISC,
ISI. What has been the key to your
but once I understood it and the prinsuccess?
ciples behind it, that was it. John
Cocke, a very brilliant guy, spent the
Herb: So one talent I seem to have
rest of his life working on it because
is a talent for research management.
it was one of his interests, but my
My senior year in college on my way
mind couldn't do it. It would be a
to graduate school I went to work for
bore. I like new things. That can be
ITT laboratories, and by the end of
good and bad.
the summer, I had ten people work-
Page 14
Jay: What else have you done in research?
Herb: During my year at Cambridge I
co-invented Schorr-Waite-Deutsch,
the fastest known algorithm for garbage collection, at least according to
Knuth. But I found I liked to work on
multiple things at once, multi-task.
I'm more productive that way. So,
rather quickly I got out of research...
although I did do research at IBM.
Jay: When is the last time you wrote
a line of code?
Herb: About 40 years.
Jay: Executive Director of ISI seems
like an important but mysterious job.
So what is the job of Executive Director?
Herb: My job is to worry about the
Institute as a whole in terms of what
areas we should be getting into that
fall between the cracks of the divisions. When I got here, there were a
lot of missing skills in the broad systems area, and I've been slowly filling
them over the years. The point of
that is we can then begin going after
the research contracts in those areas.
For example, we just hired Paul
Cohen to augment our Homeland Security area. So, I make a lot of decisions like that.
Jay: What do you do on a daily basis?
Herb: What does my day really consist of? I have meetings about new
projects, I make decisions on personnel, salary and financial issues. I now
have duties on main campus with
Distance Education and the High Performance Computing Center, so I get
updates, make decisions and set
strategic directions for those. I also
have ceremonial duties. For example,
Microsoft comes to visit, and somebody has to tell them about USC and
ISI. That requires putting together
overview presentations of ISI. I attend conferences, read papers and
books in areas I think might be possible new areas for ISI. I also often
have lunch meetings with members
of ISI to stay in touch.
Jay: Do you usually go out for lunch?
Interview with Herb Schorr, continued
Herb: Yes. Although eating in would
be better for maintaining my boyish
figure.
Jay: What is your favorite restaurant
for lunch around ISI?
Herb: None of the above. There is
nothing really worthy of mention. We
could do with a good Indian restaurant around here, though.
Jay: What’s your favorite type of music? Hip-hop?
Herb: No, mostly classical music. I
guess it’s a generation gap. Although
I knew Madonna before she was
Madonna...how's that? My wife and I
were art collectors, and there was this
graffiti artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat. We were his earliest, first and
largest collector, while he was alive.
He dated Madonna, so I used to party
with Madonna. I also knew other interesting people like Andy Warhol and
the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
Jay: No kidding, who would have
guessed? How old are you?
Herb: 67.
Congrats and Good Luck Jay!
Jay: How long do you plan to stay at
ISI?
Herb: Until they kick me out or wheel
me out on a stretcher.
Jay Modi received an ISI Meritorious
Service Award for his work during his
years here with the AI-Grads, the
group of CS GRAs supported by ISD.
AI–Grads Website!
Jay planned outings for the AI-Grads,
created a group web page and e-mail
list, coordinated group activities at
division retreats, set up research
reading groups, and wrote articles
about the AI-Grads for The InSiDer.
http://www.isi.edu/isd/ai-grads
E-mail Deepak
Ravichandran
<[email protected]>
with any
comments or
suggestions.
Every grad
student should be
included, so if you
don’t see yourself
on the list, email
Deepak, so he
knows you’re
here!
Jay engaged in these activities on his
own time, because he wanted to give
ISD graduate students a voice and
bring ISD closer together. He succeeded. As a result of his efforts, ISD
is a more hospitable place for students, they are better represented in
division affairs, and they are better
informed about activities in ISD and
in ISI, in general.
Jay will be graduating soon, and he
will be missed. Deepak Ravichandran
will be taking over the AI-Grads
group when Jay leaves.
New Additions to ISD
●We're happy to announce that Paul
Cohen will be joining ISD in September!
Paul is currently Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has been for
the past 20 years. He is a Fellow of the
AAAI. When Paul joins ISI he will serve
as Deputy Director of our division, in addition to Ed Hovy, and will take over as
Director of the Center for Research on
Unexpected Events (CRUE). Paul's Ph.D.
is from Stanford University in Computer
Science and Psychology (1983); his MS
and BA degrees in Psychology are from
UCLA and UC San Diego, respectively. At
U. Mass, Paul directed the Experimental
Knowledge Systems Laboratory. Paul’s
projects include Capture the Flag, a wargaming environment; and the Robot
Baby project, in which a robot learns
representations and their meanings sufficient for natural language and planning. Time is a central theme in Paul's
work: Sequences and series are interesting, algorithmically; much of what we
know about the world is learned by observing dynamics; and linguistic con-
structs such as manner seem to be
rooted in the way situations change.
Paul believes that AI has been statebased for too long and that it is time to
attend to dynamics. Paul also lectures
and writes on empirical methodology. He
wrote "Empirical Methods for Artificial
Intelligence," a textbook published by
MIT Press in 1995. Other books include
Volumes III and IV of "The Handbook of
Artificial Intelligence" with Edward A.
Feigenbaum and Avron B. Barr; and
"Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis"
with Xiaohui Liu. Paul has published
more than 100 articles on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence.
●Carole Beal will be joining CARTE in
September, working with Lewis Johnson
on integrating animated pedagogical
agents into adaptive teaching systems
and developing K-12 education initiatives. Carole is on leave from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where
she has been designing and evaluating
intelligent tutoring systems for K-12
mathematics. Her current project, sup-
ported by the National Science Foundation, is Wayang Outpost, a web-based
intelligent tutor that integrates high
school math and environmental biology. The Wayang site represents a fictitious research station in Borneo, populated by characters based on actual researchers and scientists who study endangered species and environmental
threats. Students who work with Wayang
receive tutoring in SAT-level math problems via animated Flash movie files that
are individually customized in real time
to enhance learning. Transfer of learning is assessed through performance on
multi-step, challenging math problems
integrated into Flash movie "adventures"
involving a specific environmental threat
(e.g., illegal logging of the rainforest)
and led by a scientist character. Evaluation studies in two school districts in
Spring 2003 showed that students who
worked with Wayang significantly improved their scores on a mock SAT Math
exam.
Volume 8, Issue 3
ISD Tidbits
●Congratulations to Greg Barish for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis. Greg is still interviewing and doesn’t
know what to do with his life yet.
●Tim Chklovski is co-organizing a workshop in conjunction with K-CAP 2003, Distributed and Collaborative
Knowledge Capture (DC-KCAP). For more information on
the workshop, visit: http://www.isi.edu/~timc/dc-kcap/
index.html
●Farewell to Abdessamad Echihabi, who returned to
Morocco after working at ISI for a year and completing a
Masters degree at USC on a Fulbright Scholarship. You
can reach Abdessamad at [email protected].
Carl Kesselman and Lewis Johnson
at the World Technology Award Gala.
Carl was a finalist in the
Software category.
●Congratulations to
Lewis
Johnson,
who was nominated
for a World Technology Network Award
in the field of Education.
The
World
Technology Awards
are presented each
year to the outstanding innovators
from
each
sector
within the technology arena.
●Congratulations to Chin-Yew
Lin, who recently added to his
family! Chin-Yew’s son, Daniel,
was born on April 11, and
weighed in at 8.2 lbs and 22
inches! Mother, father and son
are all happy and doing well.
●Congratulations Kristina Lerman, who was promoted to
Project Leader status, effective
July 1!
Stacy Marsella and David Traum,
after winning their award at AAMAS.
●Congratulations to Jay Modi, who recently successfully
defended his Ph.D. thesis . Jay will be at ISI until end of
July. In the fall, He’s going to Pittsburgh for a PostDoctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University and will
be working with Maneula Veloso there.
●Ion Muslea has left ISI and joined the Representation
and Reasoning Group at SRI International, where he’ll be
working on learning procedural knowledge and on the
EPCA's (Enduring Personalized Cognitive Agent) learning
thrust at SRI. You can still reach Ion at his ISI email until
September.
●Congratulations Behnam Salemi! Behnam successfully
defended his Ph.D. thesis in June and is currently finishing
up his thesis writing and looking for a job. He will be leaving ISI by the end of summer. After that, you can reach
him at [email protected].
The InSiDer
A Quarterly Publication of the Intelligent Systems Division
Chin-Yew’s new baby,
Daniel.
●Congratulations Stacy Marsella and Jeff Rickel! The
paper Negotiations over Tasks in Hybrid Human-Agent
Teams for Simulation-Based Training by David Traum,
Jeff Rickel, Jonathan Gratch and Stacy Marsella received
the Best Innovative System/Application Paper Award at
the AAMAS 2003 conference in Melbourne.
http://www.isi.edu/~d3admin/insideronline
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Phone: 310-448-8657
Fax: 310-822-0751
Edited by: Kathy Kurinsky
Answers: Where in ISD??? (Page 10): Object 1=Erika Barragan-Nunez’s Office (902); Object 2=Alma Nava’s Office (905); Object 3=Kevin Knight’s Office (937); Object 4=Lewis Johnson’s Office (921).