Gregory S. Aist, Ph.D.

web: www.gregoryaist.com — email: Gregory[dot]Aist[at]ASU[dot]edu

Employment

Assistant Research Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Arizona State University. 2006-present.
Member of the faculty, Applied Linguistics Program, Arizona State University. 2007-present.
Research Associate, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester. 2003-2006.
Research Scientist, Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, NASA Ames. 2001-2003.

Education

Postdoctoral work: Visiting Scientist, MIT Media Lab, 2001-2002,
  and Postdoctoral Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001.
Ph.D., Language and Information Technologies, 2000.
  Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute.
M.S., Computational Linguistics. 1997.
  Carnegie Mellon University, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy.
B.A. summa cum laude, Computer Science & Mathematics; Biology minor. Messiah College. 1995.

Honors and Awards

Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship. 2007. To perform research at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Mesa, Arizona.
Big Bang Award, Speech Technology Magazine. 2005. To NASA/Nuance for Clarissa astronaut assistant.
Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. 2003.
   To Jack Mostow and Gregory Aist for Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor.
Fulbright Scholar Award. 2002 (declined). To teach and do research at Makerere University, Uganda.
Distinguished Finalist for Outstanding Dissertation Award, International Reading Association. 2002.
National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship. 1996-2001.
Harvey Fellowship, a privately funded graduate fellowship. 1995-2000.
Computational Linguistics Research Fellowship, Philosophy Department, Carnegie Mellon. 1995-1998.
Honorable Mentions: (a) IBM Research Fellowship (finalist, 1999); (b) NSF Graduate Fellowship (1995); (c) National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (1995).
College Awards: (a) Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. 1995. (b) Alumni Award, 1995. To one graduate per year. (c) Senior Merit Award, 1994. To one senior per year.
American Legion Boys State, New York. 1990.
Research interests include human-computer interaction, spoken dialog systems, computer-assisted learning, and research methods.
Teaching and mentoring interests include artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer programming, and bioinformatics.
Service includes journal, conference, and proposal reviewing, committee & panel service, and professional memberships.
Visiting appointments and internships include the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition 5/2006-7/2006, Macquarie University 8/1998-12/1998, Microsoft Research 1/1998-2/1998, Cornell University 6/1995-8/1995, and NCR 5/1990-8/1991.
Publications and presentations in journal articles, book chapters, conferences & workshops;
(1) Added automatically generated vocabulary help to Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor, yielding the first intelligent tutoring system with performance anywhere close to expert human tutoring, when its performance on word comprehension gains for third graders proved comparable to that of human tutors.
(2) Founded NASA's Clarissa project, to help astronauts by talking them through procedures. When tested on the International Space Station, Clarissa became the first dialog system in outer space.
(3) Designed and implemented algorithms extending Rochester's TRIPS system, aimed at enabling computers to understand spoken language incrementally, as people do, as the utterance unfolds.

Research Overview

My research is in natural language processing and computer-assisted learning. Within natural language processing I have a particular interest in dialogue systems. A dialogue system is a computational device or agent that (a) engages in interaction with other human and/or computer participant(s); (b) uses human language in some form such as speech, text, or sign; and (c) typically engages in such interaction across multiple turns or sentences. The field of dialogue systems draws on disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, and psychology to study the research, development, deployment, and evaluation of such systems.

Within computer-assisted learning I have engaged in research and development of computer-assisted learning environments for areas as diverse as children learning to read and astronauts practicing and performing procedures in space.

I also have a professional interest in experimental methods for interactive systems. I have conducted experiments and systematic analysis on many varied dialog systems, using techniques from statistics and social science. I have also developed and co-developed several novel techniques for experiments in interactive systems. Examples include (a) embedded experiments for fine-grained evaluation of student learning & analysis of interactive systems; (b) mining human-human dialogs for alternate phrasings in order to enrich human-computer dialog; and (c) system-user-expert dialogs for expanding the domain of expertise of an existing interactive system.

Examples of Research and Development

Fruit Carts. 2003-2007.
I established and collected a corpus of recorded human-human dialogs in an object movement and placement task (Fruit Carts). I have also developed and contributed to architectures, algorithms, and software systems for incremental understanding of human speech. In the Fruit Carts domain we are looking at how people describe visual objects when putting together a graphical document. For example, we are examining the relationship between the difficulty of describing a property of an object (such as the angle of rotation) and the language strategies people adopt when forming descriptions and commands about that property. We have been able to show that as users continued to engage in the task, there were systemic shifts in the type of language they used. This type of language change might prove useful for tracking task mastery in a dialog system for computer-assisted learning.
I then began working on parsing techniques, system architectures, and semantic representations to allow the system to begin actions while the user's utterance is still unfolding. For example, in the Fruit Carts domain, assume the user said "First move a large square with a diamond on the corner into Central Park right on top of the flag." By the time the word with has been recognized, we can hypothesize that a large square with some decoration on it (i.e. not a plain square) is called for, and begin whatever steps are necessary to select one of the large squares. By the time the word right has been recognized, we know that we are moving the large square into Central Park, even if we don't know exactly where, and so we can begin the movement - adjusting the exact target later after the exact location has been given. with James Allen (supervisor), Ellen Campana, Edward Longhurst, Scott Stoness, Mike Tanenhaus, Joel Tetrault, and Mary Swift, all at Rochester; Liz Shriberg and Andreas Stolcke at SRI.

CALO - A cognitive assistant that learns and organizes. 2003-2006.
CALO is a large, multi-site project aimed at developing a personal assistant that can adapt to its users and learn new skills. Working on the spoken dialog subproject, I have helped to design, collect, and analyze human-human dialogs in the target domain of computer purchasing.
with James Allen (faculty supervisor), George Ferguson, and Mary Swift at Rochester; Lucian Galescu and Nate Chambers at IHMC; Amanda Stent at Stony Brook.

TRIPS - Rochester's domain-independent dialog systems framework. 2003-present.
I have used TRIPS to study continuous understanding and also in the CALO project. Work on continuous understanding is also being folded back into the TRIPS architecture.
with James Allen (faculty supervisor) and the TRIPS group at the University of Rochester and at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC).

Clarissa - a voice-enabled procedure browser for astronauts. 2001-2003.
I founded the Clarissa project, the CheckList And Robotics Intelligent Space Station Assistant. Clarissa talks astronauts through complex written procedures. Clarissa was tested on board the International Space Station in 2005 and is the first spoken dialog system used in outer space.
with John Dowding, Beth Ann Hockey, Jim Hieronymus, Barney Pell, and Manny Rayner at NASA Ames; astronaut corps and engineering personnel at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

WITAS - a dialog interface to a (simulated) robotic helicopter. 2002-2003.
We developed ways to add just-in-time help to a task-oriented dialog system in order to help the user learn what kinds of commands the system could recognize. The help came along with an example sentence using some of the words that the user had used in the previous (incorrectly specified) command. For example, if the user said "Follow that road" but the (simulated) helicopter was not capable of following roads, it might say in response "I heard you say 'follow that road', but I don't understand 'follow' when used with 'that road'. You could say something like 'Follow the red truck'."
with Oliver Lemon, Liz Bratt, and Stanley Peters at Stanford University; Ellen Campana and Beth Ann Hockey at NASA Ames.

Mobile Agents: human-robot collaboration. 2002.
Mobile Agents focuses particularly on large-scale, complex collaborative tasks, such as geological surveys in Mars analogue environments. I assisted with the spoken dialog systems component of the field test at Meteor Crater in Arizona.
with William Clancy, John Dowding, and Maarten Sierhuis, all at NASA Ames.

Affective Learning Companion - a software agent to monitor & respond to students' emotions. 2001-2002.
We designed and conducted experiments adding human-supplied emotional scaffolding to a pre-existing tutoring system, the Reading Tutor. Main result: Adding emotional scaffolding increased persistence, how long children chose to continue using the system; boys showed a 100 percent increase in persistence, while girls read all the way to the end of the session in either condition.
with Rosalind Picard (faculty sponsor), Barry Kort, and Rob Reilly at MIT; Jack Mostow at Carnegie Mellon.

Project LISTEN: a Reading Tutor that uses speech recognition to help children learn to read. 1996-2001.
The Reading Tutor displays a document one sentence at a time, listening to the child read out load, and giving help when needed and praise when warranted. In five years as the principal graduate student on Project LISTEN, I worked on nearly every aspect of developing, evaluating, and improving an intelligent tutoring system that uses spoken dialog to interact with its students, such as: review of relevant educational and psychological literature, distillation of good tutoring practice into automated behaviors, software development, experiment design and analysis, and publication & presentation of research results.
with Jack Mostow (advisor) and the Project LISTEN group at Carnegie Mellon.

Acoustic training for children's speech recognition. 1997-1998.
I devised heuristics to automatically select children's speech, collected during ordinary Reading Tutor use, that was likely to contain accurately transcribed sections. We then trained the Whisper speech recognizer on this automatically collected, automatically transcribed data, and showed improvements in recognition performance over baseline acoustic training. with Li Xiang and X.D. Huang (supervisors) at Microsoft; Jack Mostow at Carnegie Mellon.

Information retrieval and organization. 1994-1995.
Prior to graduate school, I attended information retrieval group meetings at Cornell University, and worked briefly on optical character recognition for computer science technical reports. with Gerard Salton and Claire Cardie at Cornell University.
As an undergraduate I developed a computer program to help users specify better search terms by engaging in a clarification dialogue about the meaning of their search terms. This opportunity to engage in research as an undergraduate was a gateway experience to graduate school and later research, and I plan to incorporate similar experiences for undergraduates into my own teaching. with Gene Chase (faculty advisor).

Teaching

Classroom Teaching

+ CSE 476 Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Arizona State University. Fall 2007.
+ CSE 494E/598J Research Methods for Computer Science, Arizona State University. Fall 2007.
+ CSE 494E/598J Research Methods for Computer Science, Arizona State University. Spring 2007.
+ Empirical Methods for Dialogue Systems tutorial, Association for Computational Linguistics. 2005.
+ Guest lecturer in natural language processing course, University of Rochester. 2003.
+ Teaching assistant for 15-381 Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie Mellon. 2000.
Professors Jaime Carbonell and David Cohn. Supervised writing of midterm exam. Graded homework and exams. Supervised student projects. Gave lecture on Speech Understanding.
+ Guest lecturer for Minds, Machines and Knowledge course, Carnegie Mellon. 1996.
Lecture topic: Rationalism and Empiricism in Linguistics.
+ Guest lecturer for Computer Graphics course, Messiah College.
Lecture topic: Color models.
+ Computer skills training, Messiah College. 1993-1995.
Taught electronic mail, telnet, ftp, word processing, and spreadsheet classes for faculty, staff, and students. Wrote and edited technical documentation and materials for training course.

Mentoring

+ Undergraduate supervision, University of Rochester. 2003-2005.
Co-supervised several Rochester students working on dialog systems research, including Micha Elsner, Michael Rotondo, and J. Ruskin.
+ Student mentoring, NASA Ames Research Center, 2002-2003.
Mentored four summer interns: Vladimir Tkachenko (Foothill/DeAnza), Dan Bohus (Carnegie Mellon), Brad Boven (Kalamazoo College), and Steven Phan (Santa Clara University).
+ Private tutoring in statistics and computer skills. 1993.

Academic Background

+ Professional development:
Rookie camp: A seminar on teaching and learning for new faculty. Susan Ledlow, instructor. Arizona State University, Fall 2006.
+ Graduate classes:
phonetics & phonemics, syntax, semantics & logic; natural language processing (such as computational morphology, parsing, discourse modeling); statistical natural language processing, machine learning; speech recognition; second language acquisition; robotic art studio; learning & instructional processes.
Graduate instructors included Bob Carpenter, Chris Manning, Barbara DiEugenio, Nancy Green; Avrim Blum, Tom Mitchell, Alex Waibel; Alan Lesgold, Sally Thomason.
+ Undergraduate-level classes:
history, religion, culture, ethics, and the arts; artificial intelligence, computer graphics, natural language processing, programming languages, databases, computer architecture, operating systems, networking, data structures & algorithms, theory of computation; linear algebra, combinatorics, abstract algebra, geometry, differential equations, numerical analysis, real analysis, complex analysis, introductory statistics, mathematical modeling; ecology, ecological field techniques, horticulture, genetics.
Undergraduate instructors included Gene Chase, Marvin Brubaker, Barry DeRoos, Dwight Paine, and Joseph Sheldon.
+ Languages studied: English (native speaker), German, Greek, and Latin.

Technical Proficiencies

+ Software process and design: Rapid prototyping, participatory design, object-oriented design.
+ Programming languages and technologies: C/C++ (17 years), Prolog (12 years), HTML (12 years), perl, Javascript, CSS, XML, Java, LISP, Pascal, SQL, batch and shell scripts.
+ Operating systems: Windows NT/2000/XP, Unix, Cygwin, Macintosh OSX.
+ Databases and statistical analysis: SPSS, Excel, Access.
+ Applications and tools: Word, PowerPoint, Mathematica, Emacs, Visual SourceSafe, CVS.
+ Audiovisual editing: Praat, VideoRedo, FRAPS, Photoshop.

Service

Committees and Panels

+ National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant Proposal Review Panel. 2007.
+ Program Committee, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL). Area: Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics. 2007.
+ Program Committee, The Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Special Track on Integrated Intelligence. 2007.
+ Program Committee, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Annual Meeting. 2007.
+ Advisory Committee, Young Researchers' Roundtable. 2005.
+ Program Committee, HLT-NAACL workshop on building educational applications using natural language processing. 2003.
+ Organizing Committee, AAAI Spring Symposium on natural language generation in spoken and written dialogue. 2003.
+ Convener, Panel Discussion on Scientific Publications and Computer Science, NASA Ames. 2003.
+ Panel member, ITS workshop on empirical methods, panel on coding dialogue. 2002.
+ Working group co-chair, Multi-lingual systems and multi-lingual environments. MIT, July 22, 2001.
Development by Design: Workshop on Collaborative Open Source Design of Appropriate Technologies.
+ Session chair, Spoken Language Models and Dialog 1. 1998.
International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP). Sydney, Australia.
+ Organizer, Sigma Zeta Colloquium on Research in Engineering, Natural Sciences, & Mathematical Sciences. 1994.

Reviewing

+ Computational Linguistics. 2007.
+ Cognitive Science Conference. 2007.
+ AIED, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. 2007.
+ NAACL/HLT Conference. 2007.
+ Cognitive Science Conference. 2006.
+ IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B. 2006.
+ Cognitive Science Conference. 2005.
+ Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) workshop on dialogue systems and computer tutoring. 2004.
+ IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference. 2004.
+ AI-ED workshop on tutorial dialogue systems: with a view toward the classroom. 2003.
+ ITS workshop on empirical methods. 2002.
+ Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI-ED) Conference. 2001.
+ Harvey Fellowship application reviewer. 1998 and 1999.

Professional & Community Involvement

+ Member, 12+ Working Group, Autism Initiative, Arizona State University. 2007.
+ Member, Computer Science Advisory Board, Messiah College. 2006.
+ Judge, Research in Engineering and Applied Sciences (REAS) Symposium, Arizona State University. 2006.
+ Prospective student host, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, University of Rochester. 2006.
+ Participant, We the People. 2004-present. Community-based focus group sponsored by local public radio station WXXI and MacNeil/Lehrer. Forum on education, 2005; forum on election, 2004.
+ Audiovisual student volunteer coordinator, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2001), June 2-7, 2001.
+ Member, Board of Directors, Woodard's Educational Services. 2001. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
+ Student volunteer, National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 1997.
+ Student volunteer, International Symposium on Spoken Dialog, Philadelphia, 1996.
+ Faculty-Student Representative, Computational Linguistics Program, Carnegie Mellon. 1995 to 1996.
+ Founding member and President, Beta Lambda Chapter of Sigma Xi. 1994 to 1995.
+ Undergraduate Activities included: (a) Sunrayce Genesis Solar Car Team, 1995. (b) Programming Team, 1991-1992.

Additional Information

Software Development & User Community Technical Support

+ Cornell University. June to August 1995.
+ Messiah College. 1992 to 1995. Software to support college administration and classroom education.
+ NCR. May 1990 to August 1991. Product evaluation software for point-of-sale printers.
+ Personal assistant. April 1990 - August 1991. Personal assistant to the late Professor Israel Berstein, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY. (Dr. Berstein was in the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease.) Helped to maintain personal computer system. Aided in implementation of speech synthesizer and Morse code system in home computer system. Took dictation for personal and professional communications.

Professional Memberships
Science and Learning Language and Computation
Bioinformatics.org American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Cognitive Science Society Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
International Reading Association Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Mathematical Association of America ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) for Artificial Intelligence
Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society ACM SIG for Computer-Human Interaction
Sigma Zeta National Science & Mathematics Honor Society Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
  International Speech Communication Association

Publications and Presentations

    Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  1. Aist, G. In revision. System-user-expert dialogs to help engineer new capabilities for an existing spoken dialog system. Submitted to Natural Language Engineering.
  2. Aist, G.S. and Mostow, J. In press. Faster, Better Task Choice in a Reading Tutor that Listens. To appear in Philippe DeCloque and Melissa Holland (Editors), The Path of Speech Technologies in Computer Assisted Language Learning: From Research Toward Practice. London: Taylor & Francis. Expected publication date Nov. 5th 2007 (as of Oct. 1st 2007).
  3. Mostow, J., Aist, G.S., Huang, C., Junker, B., Kennedy, R., Lan, H., Latimer,D., O'Connor, R., Tassone, R., Tobin, B., and Wierman, A. In press. 4-Month Evaluation of a Learner-controlled Reading Tutor that Listens. To appear in Philippe DeCloque and Melissa Holland (Editors), The Path of Speech Technologies in Computer Assisted Language Learning: From Research Toward Practice. London: Taylor & Francis. Expected publication date Nov. 5th 2007 (as of Oct. 1st 2007).
  4. Aist, G.S., Bohus, D., Boven, B., Campana, E., Early, S., and Phan, S. 2004. Initial development of a voice-activated astronaut assistant for procedural tasks: From need to concept to prototype. Journal of Interactive Instruction Development 16(3): 32-36.
  5. Mostow, J., Aist, G., Burkhead, P., Corbett, A., Cuneo, A., Eitelman, S., Huang, C., Junker, B., Sklar, M. B., & Tobin, B. 2003. Evaluation of an automated Reading Tutor that listens: Comparison to human tutoring and classroom instruction. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 29(1):61-117. [Word online].
  6. Aist, G. 2002. Helping Children Learn Vocabulary during Computer-Assisted Oral Reading. Educational Technology and Society 5(2). [HTML online] .
  7. Aist, G. 2001. Towards automatic glossarization: automatically constructing and administering vocabulary assistance factoids and multiple-choice assessment. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 12: 212-231. [HTML online].
  8. Mostow, J. and Aist, G. 2001. Evaluating tutors that listen: An overview of Project LISTEN. In K.D. Forbus & P.J. Feltovich (Eds.), Smart machines in education: The coming revolution in educational technology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  9. Mostow, J. and Aist, G. 1999. Giving help and praise in a Reading Tutor with imperfect listening: Because automated speech recognition means never being able to say you're certain. CALICO Journal 16(3): 407-424. Special issue (M. Holland, Ed.), Tutors that Listen: Speech recognition for Language Learning.
  10. Aist, G. 1999. Speech recognition in computer assisted language learning. In K. C. Cameron (ed.), Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL): Media, Design, and Applications. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.

    11. Conference Proceedings

    Conferences and workshops in computer-science related fields typically have selective review processes involving two or more reviewers evaluating a complete paper, rather than only an abstract.
  11. Aist, G. An intelligent environment for constructive writing support. 36th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest. Denver, Colorado. September 21-23, 2007.
  12. Aist, G. Enhancing team learning during simulation-based training. Proceedings of the Washington Interactive Technologies Conference, Society for Applied Learning Technology. 2007.
  13. Aist, G., Allen, J., Campana, E., Gomez Gallo, C.A., Stoness, S., Swift, M., and Tanenhaus, M.K. Incremental dialogue system faster than and preferred to its nonincremental counterpart. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Paper PP-779. 2007.
  14. Aist, G. Incremental constraint-based equitable and efficient natural language parsing. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Member Abstract MA-388. 2007.
  15. Aist, G.S., Allen, J., Campana, E., Galescu, L., Gomez Gallo, C.A., Stoness, S., Swift, M., and Tanenhaus, M. 2006. Software architectures for incremental understanding of human speech. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP). Pittsburgh, September 17-21. [PDF online], [Word online].
  16. Hieronymus, J., Aist, G.S., and Dowding, J. 2006. Open microphone speech understanding: Correct discrimination of in-domain speech. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Toulouse, France, May 14-19.
  17. Aist, G.S., Campana, E., Allen, J., Rotondo, M., Swift, M., and Tanenhaus, M. 2005. Variations along the contextual continuum in task-oriented speech. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy, July. Paper number 769. [PDF online].
  18. Allen, J., Ferguson, G., Stent, A., Stoness, S., Swift, M., Galescu, L., Chambers, N., Campana, E., and Aist, G.S. 2005. Two diverse systems built using generic components for spoken dialogue (Recent Progress on TRIPS). Interactive Demonstration track, Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June. [PDF online].
  19. Aist, G. S. 2004. Three-way system-user-expert interactions help you expand the capabilities of an existing spoken dialogue system. 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju Island, Korea, Oct. 4-8.
  20. Aist, G.S., Allen, J., and Galescu, L. 2004. Expanding the linguistic coverage of a spoken dialogue system by mining human-human dialogue for new sentences with familiar meanings. Member Abstract, 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago, Aug. 5-7.
  21. Rayner, M., Hockey, B.A., Hieronymus, J., Dowding, J., Aist, G., Early, S. 2003. An intelligent procedure assistant built using Regulus 2 and Alterf. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Demo Session: Sapporo, Japan, July 2003.
  22. Hockey, B.A., Lemon, O., Campana, E., Hiatt, L., Aist, G., Hieronymus, J., and Dowding, J. Targeted Help. 2003. European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Conference, Budapest, Hungary, April.
  23. Aist, G., Dowding, J., Hockey, B.A., Rayner, M., Hieronymus, J., Bohus, D., Boven, B., Blaylock, N., Campana, E., Early, S., Gorrell, G., and Phan, S. Talking through procedures: An intelligent Space Station procedure assistant. 2003. European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Conference, Software Demonstration, Budapest, Hungary, April.
  24. Hockey, B.A., Dowding, J., Aist, G., and Hieronymus, J. 2002. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Conference, Demo Session. Philadelphia, July 7-12.
  25. Aist, G., Dowding, J., Hockey, B.A., and Hieronymus, J. 2002. A demonstration of a spoken dialogue interface to an intelligent procedure assistant for astronaut training and support. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2002 meeting, Demo Session. Philadelphia, July 7-12.
  26. Mostow, J., Aist, G., Bey, J., Burkhead, P., Cuneo, A., Junker, B., Rossbach, S., Tobin, B., Valeri, J., & Wilson, S. 2002. Independent practice versus computer-guided oral reading: Equal-time comparison of sustained silent reading to an automated reading tutor that listens. Ninth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Chicago, Illinois. June 27-30.
  27. Aist, G., Kort, B., Reilly, R., Mostow, J., and Picard, R. 2002. Adding human-provided emotional scaffolding to an automated Reading Tutor that listens increases student persistence. Poster presented at Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) Conference, Biarritz, France, June 5-7. [PDF online] .
  28. Mostow, J., Aist, G., Beck, J., Chalasani, R., Cuneo, A., Jia, P., and Kadaru, K. 2002. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or As Time Goes By: Where does the time go in a Reading Tutor that listens? Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) 2002, Biarritz, France.
  29. Aist, G. Helping children learn vocabulary during computer-assisted oral reading: A dissertation summary. 2002. (Poster presented as a Distinguished Finalist for the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award). 47th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association, San Francisco, CA, April 29.
  30. Dowding, J., Frank, J., Hockey, B.A., Jonsson, A., and Aist, G. 2002. Demonstration of a spoken dialogue interface for planning activities of a semi-autonomous robot. Human Language Technologies (HLT). San Diego, California.
  31. Mostow, J., Aist, G., Bey, J., Burkhead, P., Cuneo, A., Rossbach, S., Tobin, B., Valeri, J., and Wilson, S. 2001. A hands-on demonstration of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor and its embedded experiments. Demonstration at the Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 2-7. [PDF online] .
  32. Aist, G. 2001. Factoids: Automatically constructing and administering vocabulary assistance and assessment. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. San Antonio, Texas, May 19-23. [PDF online] .
  33. Aist, G., Mostow, J., Tobin, B., Burkhead, P., Corbett, A., Cuneo, A., Junker, B., and Sklar, M. B. 2001. Computer-assisted oral reading helps children learn vocabulary better than a classroom control - and even just as well as one-on-one human-assisted oral reading. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. San Antonio, Texas, May 19-23.
  34. Mostow, J., Corbett, A., Aist, G., and others. 2001. Taking lessons from human tutoring in order to improve computer-assisted oral reading. Poster in the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. San Antonio, Texas, May 19-23.
  35. Aist, G. 2000. Helping children learn vocabulary during computer assisted oral reading. Doctoral Consortium, AAAI 2000. Austin, Texas, Jul. 30-Aug. 3. [Postscript online].
  36. Aist, G. 2000. Identifying words to explain to a reader: A preliminary study. Student Abstract, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference. Austin, Texas, Jul. 30-Aug. 3. [Word online]
  37. Aist, G. and Mostow, J. 2000. Improving story choice in a reading tutor that listens. Poster presented at Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Montreal, June 19-23. [Word online].
  38. Aist, G. An informal model of vocabulary acquisition during assisted oral reading and some implications for computerized instruction. 2000. Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) - Young Researchers Track. Montreal, June 19-23. [Word online].
  39. Mostow, J. and Aist, G. 1999. Authoring new material in a Reading Tutor that listens. Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Orlando, FL, July, pp. 918-919. In the refereed Intelligent Systems Demonstration track. Also presented at 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), College Park, MD, June 1999.
  40. Aist, G. 1999. Skill-specific spoken dialogs in a reading tutor that listens. Doctoral Consortium paper. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Pittsburgh, PA, May 15-20.
  41. Mostow, J., and Aist, G. 1999. Project LISTEN: A Reading Tutor that listens. CHIkids Technology Workout. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Pittsburgh, PA, May 15-20.
  42. Aist, G. 1998. Expanding a time-sensitive conversational architecture for turn-taking to handle content-driven interruption. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), Sydney, Australia, Nov. 30-Dec. 4. Paper 928. [PDF online] .
  43. Aist, G., Chan, P., Huang, X.D., Jiang, L., Kennedy, R., Latimer, D., Mostow, J., and Yeung, C. 1998. How effective is unsupervised data collection for children's speech recognition? International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), Sydney, Australia, Nov. 30-Dec. 4. Paper 929. [PDF online] .
  44. Aist, G., and Mostow, J. 1997. Adapting human tutorial interventions for a Reading Tutor that listens: Using continuous speech recognition in interactive educational multimedia. In CALL Conference on Multimedia. Exeter, England. Sept. [PDF online].
  45. Mostow, J., and Aist, G.. 1997. The sounds of silence: Towards automated evaluation of student learning in a Reading Tutor that listens. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Providence, RI, July. Pages 355-361. [PDF online].
  46. Mostow, J., and Aist, G. 1997. Project LISTEN: A Reading Tutor that listens. In World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. Calgary, Canada, June. Live demonstration.
  47. Gavalda, M., Zechner, K., and Aist, G. 1997. High performance segmentation of spontaneous speech using part of speech and trigger word information. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Washington, D.C., U.S.A., April.
  48. Aist, G., Finch, C., and Heffelfinger, A. 1995. Intersections of a single helix with a plane. Sigma Zeta National Conference. Campbellsville College, Campbellsville KY. March.
  49. Aist, G.. 1995. Labeling strategies for directed acyclic graphs. Moravian College Student Mathematics Conference. Moravian College, Bethlehem PA. February.
  50. Aist, G.. 1994. Optimal forest management: A spreadsheet stage-class model. Moravian College Student Mathematics Conference. Moravian College, Bethlehem PA. February 1994. Also presented at Sigma Zeta National Conference. Hillsdale College, Hillsdale MI. March.

    51. Workshops, Symposia, and Colloquia

  51. Aist, G. 2007. Automated generation of a concise contextual summary of key training events. DMO Workshop, Mesa, Arizona. September 5-7.
  52. Aist, G., Allen, J., Campana, E., Gomez Gallo, C., Stoness, S., Swift, M., and Tanenhaus, M.K. 2007. Incremental understanding in human-computer dialogue and experimental evidence for advantages over nonincremental methods. In Proceedings of DECALOG – The 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Trento, Italy, May 30-June 1.
  53. Gomez Gallo, C., Aist, G., Allen, J., de Beaumont, W., Coria, S., Gegg-Harrison, W., Pardal, J., and Swift, M. 2007. Annotating continuous understanding in a multimodal dialogue corpus. In Proceedings of DECALOG – The 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Trento, Italy, May 30-June 1.
  54. Aist, G. 2006. Computer vision, eyetracking, spoken dialog systems, and evaluation: Challenges and opportunities. Interspeech-06 Satellite Workshop Dialogue on Dialogues - Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interactive Systems. [PDF online].
  55. Aist, G., Michalak, P., Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. 2006. Challenges in evaluating spoken dialog systems that reason and learn. Interspeech-06 Satellite Workshop Dialogue on Dialogues - Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interactive Systems. [PDF online].
  56. Aist, G. 2006. Research description and biography. Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems. [PDF online].
  57. Aist, G. 2006. Incrementally segmenting incoming speech into pragmatic fragments. The Third Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium (MCLC-2006). Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. May 20-21, 2006. [PDF online].
  58. Aist, G., Stoness, S., and Allen, J. 2006. Steps towards incremental semantics for spoken dialog systems. The Third Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium (MCLC-2006). Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. May 20-21, 2006. [PDF online].
  59. Aist, G. 2005. Research description and biography. Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, Lisbon, Portugal. Sept. 1. [PDF online].
  60. Stoness, S.C., Allen, J., Aist, G., and Swift, M. 2005. Using real-world reference to improve spoken language understanding. AAAI Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July. pp. 38-45. [PDF online].
  61. Aist, G. 2004. Speech, gaze, and mouse data from choosing, placing, painting, rotating, and filling (virtual) vending carts. International Committee for Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases (COCOSDA) Workshop, Jeju Island, Korea, Oct. 4.
  62. Aist, G., Rayner, M., Dowding, J., Hockey, B. A., Early, S., and Hieronymus, J. 2003. A procedure assistant for astronauts in a functional programming architecture, with step previewing and spoken correction of dialogue moves. SIGDial workshop, Japan, July.
  63. Dowding, J., Aist, G., Hockey, B. A., and Bratt, E. O. 2003. Generating canonical example sentences using candidate words. AAAI Spring Symposium on Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue. March 24-26.
  64. Dowding, J., Frank, J., Hockey, B.A., Jonsson, A., Aist, G., and Hieronymus, J. 2002. A spoken dialogue interface to the EUROPA planner. International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space, Houston, TX, Oct. 27-29.
  65. Hockey, B. A., Aist, G., Hieronymus, J., Lemon, O., and Dowding, J. 2002. Targeted Help: Embedded training and methods for evaluation. Proceedings of the ITS 2002 Workshop on Empirical Methods for Tutorial Dialogue Systems. San Sebastian, Spain, June 4. pp. 70-74. [PDF online].
  66. Aist, G., Kort, B., Reilly, R., Mostow, J., and Picard, R. 2002. Experimentally augmenting an intelligent tutoring system with human-supplied capabilities: Adding human-provided emotional scaffolding to an automated Reading Tutor that listens. Proceedings of the ITS 2002 Workshop on Empirical Methods for Tutorial Dialogue Systems. San Sebastian, Spain, June 4. pp. 16-28. [PDF online].
  67. Aist, G., and Hockey, B. A. 2002. Generating training and assistive dialogues for astronauts from International Space Staion technical documentation. ITS 2002 Workshop on Integrating Technical and Training Documentation. Presented along with system demonstration.
  68. Aist, G. Towards worldwide literacy: Technological affordances, economic challenges, affordable technology. 2001. Development by Design: Workshop on Collaborative Open Source Design of Appropriate Technologies. MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 22. [PDF online] .
  69. Aist, G. 2000. Taking turns talking about text in a Reading Tutor that listens. Third International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation. Bellagio, Italy, July 3-5. [PDF online] .
  70. Aist, G. 2000. Human tutor and computer tutor story choice in listening to children read aloud. Workshop on Modeling Human Teaching, Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Montreal, June 19.
  71. Aist, G. and Mostow, J. 2000. Using automated within-subject invisible experiments to test the effectiveness of automated vocabulary assistance. Workshop on Applying Machine Learning to ITS Design/Construction. Montreal, June 19.
  72. Aist, G. and Mostow, J. 1999. Measuring the effects of backchanneling in computerized oral reading tutoring. Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Prosody and Dialog. Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September. [PDF online].
  73. Aist, G. and Mostow, J. 1998. Estimating the effectiveness of conversational behaviors in a Reading Tutor that listens. AAAI Spring Symposium on Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing, Stanford, CA, March. [PDF online].
  74. Kominek, J., Aist, G., and Mostow, J. 1998. When listening Is not enough: Potential uses of vision for a Reading Tutor that listens. AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Environments, Stanford, CA, March. [PDF online].
  75. G. S. Aist and J. Mostow. 1997. A time to be silent and a time to speak: Time-sensitive communicative actions in a reading tutor that listens. AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Actions in Humans and Machines. Boston, MA, November. [PDF online].
  76. Aist, G.S., and Mostow, J. 1997. When speech input is not an afterthought: A Reading Tutor that listens. Proceedings of the Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, Banff, Canada, October.
  77. Aist, G. 1997. Challenges for a mixed initiative spoken dialog system for oral reading tutoring. In Computational Models for Mixed Initiative Interaction: Working Notes of the AAAI 1997 Spring Symposium. March. [PDF online].
  78. Aist, G. 1994. A historical account of natural language processing. Sigma Zeta Colloquim on Research in Engineering, the Natural Sciences, and the Mathematical Sciences. Grantham, Pennsylvania. December.
  79. Aist, G., Bert, C., and Learn, P.J. 1994. Automatic temperature data acquisition: Newton's law of cooling. Mathematical Modeling Workshop. Grantham, Pennsylvania. July.
  80. Aist, G., Bert, C., and Learn, P.J. 1994. Scheduling graph for a round robin tournament. Mathematical Modeling Workshop. Grantham, Pennsylvania. July.

    81. Manuscripts in Preparation

  81. Aist, G., Stoness, S., Swift, M., and Allen, J. In preparation. Time and time again: Evaluating dialog systems that process language incrementally.
  82. Aist, G.S., Allen, J., Campana, E., Galescu, L., Gomez Gallo, C.A., Stoness, S., Swift, M., and Tanenhaus, M. In preparation. Steps towards human-computer interaction with spoken dialog systems that incrementally understand human speech.

    83. Talks and Presentations

    Topics are listed rather than exact titles of talks, except where noted.
  83. Aist, G. tentative. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
  84. Aist, G. May 31st, 2006. Arizona State University. Incremental natural language processing for dialog systems (title).

    85. Intelligent and interactive systems for conversation and learning. (title).
  85. Aist, G. April 24th, 2006. Florida State University.
  86. Aist, G. April 13th, 2006. Rochester Institute of Technology.
  87. Aist, G. April 3rd, 2006. Texas A&M University.
  88. Aist, G. March 13th, 2006. University of Memphis.
  89. Aist, G. March 10th, 2006. Clemson University.
  90. Aist, G. March 6th, 2006. University of Arkansas, Little Rock.
  91. Aist, G. February 2006. University of California, Merced.
  92. Aist, G. Spring 2006. University of Rochester.
  93. Aist, G. January 2006. Cornell University.

    94. Continuous understanding and dialog systems. (topic).
  94. Aist, G. Fall 2005. Carnegie Mellon University.
  95. Aist, G. Summer 2004. University of York.
  96. Aist, G. Summer 2004. University of Edinburgh.

  97. Allen, J., and Aist, G. 2004. Prospectives Weekend, University of Rochester. Spoken dialog systems. (topic).
  98. Hieronymus, J., and Aist, G. 2003. NASA Workshop on Human-Centered Computing. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Space Station procedure assistant. (topic).
  99. Aist, G. March 4, 2003. University of Rochester. Spoken dialog systems at NASA Ames. (topic).
  100. Aist, G. December 2001. NASA Ames Research Center. Internal presentation on R&D opportunities for spoken dialog systems and computer-assisted learning, in astronaut training and other space applications.
  101. Mostow, J., and Aist, G. November 2001. Invited address to workshop on "Bridging the Digital Divide for Work and Play", Toronto, Ontario.
  102. Aist, G. 2001. Cambridge University. Learning vocabulary during computer-assisted oral reading.
  103. Aist, G. 2001. University of Edinburgh. Learning vocabulary during computer-assisted oral reading.
  104. Aist, G. 2001. NASA Ames Research Center. Helping children learn vocabulary during computer-assisted oral reading & how lessons could be applied to spoken dialog systems for NASA applications.
  105. Aist, G. May 25, 2001. University of Texas at Austin. Factoids: Automatically constructing and administering vocabulary assistance and assessment. (title).
  106. Aist, G. November 17, 1998. SALS-SIG Seminar at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Computer-assisted oral reading.
  107. Aist, G.August 27, 1998. Improving elementary students' reading abilities with skill-specific spoken dialogs in a Reading Tutor that listens. (title). Ph.D. thesis proposal.
  108. Aist, G. April 7, 1998. Evaluating a Reading Tutor that listens. Logic and AI Seminar talk, University of Maryland UMIACS, College Park MD.
  109. Mostow, J., and Aist, G. April 6, 1998. Evaluating tutors that listen. CIRCLE Seminar talk, LRDC, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA.
  110. Aist, G. April 24, 1996. Learning morphological features and word order for unknown word part of speech tagging using an oblique classifier. (title). Computational Linguistics Student Seminar, Carnegie Mellon.

    Dissertations and Projects

  111. Ph.D. dissertation — Aist, G. 2000. Helping children learn vocabulary during computer-assisted oral reading. Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon. [PDF online]. Committee: Jack Mostow (advisor), Albert Corbett, Alex Rudnicky, Charles Perfetti (University of Pittsburgh).
  112. M.S. project — Aist, G. 1997. A general architecture for a real-time discourse agent and a case study in oral reading tutoring. Computational Linguistics, Philosophy Department, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon. Committee: Jack Mostow (advisor), Nancy Green, Alex Rudnicky.
  113. B.A. — (a) Aist, G. 1995. Thesaurus-based interactive search term clarification using Termite. Major Honors Project. Advisor: Gene Chase. (b) Aist, G. 1995. On the road and under the hood on the information superhighway. Senior Seminar term project. (c)Aist, G. 1994. Syntactic and semantic strategies for natural language processing. Major Honors Preliminary Paper.

    Additional Publications

  114. Aist, G. et al. 2006. PLOW User Manual. [HTML online] .
  115. Allen, J., and Aist, G. 2006. PLOW Evaluation Specification. [HTML online] .
  116. Mostow, J. and Aist, G. 1999. Reading and Pronunciation Tutor. United States Patent No. 5,920,838. Filed June 2, 1997; issued July 6, 1999. US Patent and Trademark Office. Summarized in Patents: A Computer Tutor for Children Learning to Read (Teresa Riordan). New York Times, Sept. 27, 1999, Vol. CXLIX, No. 51,658, p. C8.
  117. Aist, G. 1995. Review of Shadows of the Mind: On Consciousness, Computation, and the New Physics of the Mind (Roger Penrose). [HTML online]. Department of Mathematical Sciences Newsletter, Sept. 1995.