Projects
Current Projects
- 2008: Asking Questions: How can a computer share what it senses about a situation and ask questions about it in a concise and easily-understandable way? How can the computer formulate questions about a situation to invite a more specific answer than the question requires? People answer yes/no questions all the time with conjunctions to give more information, but can we elicit the same types of responses when computers ask the questions? I am working on guidelines for formulating questions with these properties.
- 2007-2008: Dynamic Specialists: I extend general experts algorithms to dynamically determine specialists or sleeping experts in large datasets like recommendation systems when the sleeping experts cannot be determined manually. In recommendation systems, the product categories used for dynamic specialists are equivalent to domain-specific recommendation systems. I show that for the class of problems where dynamic specialists help prediction, it is detrimental to recombine the domain-specific recommendation systems.
Previous Projects
- 2006-2007: My senior thesis with the Smart Home group was to learn family routines in order to predict reminders before the family forgets something. The reminders would be presented on cell phones to parents.
- 2004-2007: Kiva is a collaborative tool for students which consists of online asynchronous communication and synchronous meeting rooms. I studied collaborative learning in non-co-located environments (compared to co-located collaboration) in by determining the differences in group communication in both conditions.
- 2003: Valerie the Roboceptionist (now Tank) is located in Newell-Simon Hall at Carnegie Mellon University. The robots have personalities and stories developed by the Drama Dept and also help visitors find their way to offices in the School of Computer Science. I helped populate the chatbot responses for Valerie.
- 2002-2004: GRACE and George are robots designed to attend the AAAI and IJCAI conferences for the Robot Challenge. In 2003, I designed the facial expressions the robots used to express their mood (especially frustration) at the conference. In 2004, I developed the direction-giving algorithm that the robots used to help conference attendees find rooms.