[IEEE-bhpjobs] Saturday, October 15, 2005 LSRC

[Walter Heger]

networking opportunitity and a chance to learn something new!

Hello everyone!

Below you will find the program of technical talks for Alan Biermann's
Retirement Celebration.  This program will run from 1:00 pm to 5:30 pm
on Saturday, October 15, 2005, and take place in Room D106 Levine
Science Research Center (LSRC-D) at West campus at Duke University.
Alan hopes to see you there!


Technical Sessions for Alan Biermann's Retirement Celebration

1:00pm: Welcome

SESSION 1: Alan Biermann's Influence

1:10pm:
Eric Jensen
Title:Ê Improbable applications of AI techniques, or what I learned
from
Dr. Biermann and how it has carried me for thirty years

A review of a few important ideas that I learned here at Duke, and some
unusual real world uses for D. E. Knuth, Assembler language, Y73,
hashing, sorting, searching and evaluation, and performance analysis.Ê
Special emphasis on the impressions that Alan made on me, and his
lasting influence in my career.

1:25pm: discussion

---

1:30pm:
Anne Holler
Title:  Teamwork

Engineering a system platform is key to enabling breakthrough research
and products.Ê Working on Alan Biermann's NLC project provided a model
for effective teamwork during this process, which has formed a
touchstone
for me.

1:45pm: discussion

---

1:50pm:
Bruce Ballard
Title:  Qui je suis?

In an attempt to identify who after all I am (qui je suis) after all
these years, I'll talk about the various enterprises I've found myself
associated with through the years: teaching; research; software
development for education, then entertainment, and now business. I'll
talk a little about being a manager and owning a software company. I'll
end by noting two Biermannesque things that have been constant through
the years.

2:05pm: discussion

---

2:10pm:
Amr Fahmy
Title:  One of Alan's Insights

I will give a brief talk about one of Alan's insights that helped me
through my career.

2:25pm: discussion

---

2:30pm: BREAK

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SESSION 2: Academia

2:45pm:
Ronnie Smith
Title:  When in Doubt, Talk It Out: Experiences and Discoveries while
Studying Natural Language Dialog

Natural language dialog research has provided the opportunity for a
variety of
discoveries not only about computational models of dialog, but also
about
research, education, and life in general.  Aspects of a few of these
experiences and discoveries will be shared.

3:00pm: discussion

---

3:05pm:
Joyce Chai
Title:  Robust Multimodal Interpretation in Conversational Systems

Multimodal conversational systems promote more natural and effective
human machine communication by allowing users to interact with systems
through multiple modalities such as speech and gesture. Despite recent
advances, interpreting what users communicate to the system is still a
significant challenge due to insufficient recognition (e.g., speech
recognition) and understanding (e.g., language understanding)
performance. To address this problem, we have been developing
techniques
to improve the robustness in multimodal interpretation. In this talk, I
will give a brief overview about our current research in this direction
and present some recent results.

3:20pm: discussion

---

3:25pm:
Douglas Smith
Title:  Progress in Program Synthesis

As a grad student working for Alan, we developed some methods for
generating programs from examples.  This sparked my interest in
program synthesis and thirty years later I'm still at it.  There has
been steady progress and I'd like to present some highlights.

3:40pm: discussion

---

3:45pm:
Dana Nau
Title:  Closing the Loop: Games to Planning to Games

My Ph.D. research was on game-tree search, but a few years later I
veered over into AI planning.  I'll briefly summarize that work and
will
discuss several applications of it, some of which have taken me back to
working on game-tree search again.

4:00pm: discussion

---

4:05pm: BREAK

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SESSION 3: Industry, IT, and Society

4:20pm:
Mike Fulkerson
Title:  Commercial Business Rules products and how they are influenced
by AI and NLP

4:25pm: discussion

---

4:40pm:
Richard Hipp
Title:  Diplomas from Duke do not say "computer science"

How spending five years in the voice lab under Alan Biermann, then
graduating and never again doing anything with computational
linguistics
can still be a worthwhile endeavor.

4:55pm: discussion

---

5:00pm:
Curry Guinn
Title:  What Every Citizen Needs to Know About Information Technology

The most efficient means of insuring that our citizens are
well-informed
about information technology is to formally educate them, in the same
manner we educate them about English, math, history and the sciences.
But what do we tell them?  What is essential for them to know?
Several
answers to this question have been offered in ground-breaking textbooks
such as Great Ideas in Computer Science and the National Research
Council's report Being Fluent with Information Technology.   In this
talk, I will approach the problem by venturing a look at the next few
decades and seeing what decisions related to IT every citizen will be
required to make.

5:15pm: discussion

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5:20pm: closing remarks by Alan

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