Human-Centered Language Processing and Extended Ambient Intelligence at IHMC

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 communication agents for assistive technology, including understanding and adapting to progressively impaired speech, as well as additional human-centered research at IHMC, e.g., deep language understanding, natural language dialogue, humanoid robotics, and exoskeleton research.
Dr. Bonnie Dorr is a Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) of Ocala, Florida, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. She is a former DARPA Program Manager of Human Language Technology, and also served as Maryland's Associate Dean for the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). She co-founded the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Laboratory in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where she served as a director for 15 years. She was also Principal Scientist for two years at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). For 30+ years, she has been conducting research in several areas of broad-scale multilingual processing, e.g., machine translation, summarization, and deep language understanding. She is a Sloan Fellow, a NSF Presidential Faculty (PECASE) Fellow, former President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2008), a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2013), and a recently inducted member of the Leadership Florida Class of XXXIII (2014-2015).