Objective

Finding an employment that enhances my experience in language and speech technology, field innovative products and gain business experience. Graduation with PhD expected in late April/May 2001.

Employment

1995 - current Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA

Research programmer and PhD candidate (Karlsruhe University)

• Development of language technology: language modeling for speech
  recognition, statistical dialog analysis, emotion detection and information
  access modules

• Participation in speech recognition evaluations and major conferences

• Funding by DARPA projects, presented research to the agency

• Participation in the LVCSR summer workshop (1997, per invitation)

1994 - 1995 University of Freiburg Freiburg, Germany

Graduate stipend

• Research on workflow management and database systems

• Solicited and accepted a position at Carnegie Mellon University

1991 - 1994 University of Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany

Part time research programmer (undergraduate level)

• Application of linear and mixed integer programming to theorem proving

1992 IBM Böblingen/Schöneich, Germany

Internship

• Prototypical implementation of an object oriented database scheme

1988 and 1990 SIEMENS AG Karlsruhe, Germany

Internship

• Creation of training materials for process control systems

• Generation of examples for real time UNIX applications

• Translation support for English documents

• Port of a database system

1986 - 1988 GPS Jever, Germany

Social service

• Work with mentally handicapped adults

• Social service as mandated for conscientious objectors

• Part time studies of economics

Education

1995 - current University of Karlsruhe Germany

PhD candidate, computer science, completion expect in April/May 2001

• Thesis on information access to oral communication

• Worked as a research programmer with Prof. Alex Waibel

• Work on language modeling, dialog processing and emotion detection

• Participation in speech recognition evaluations

• Participation in the 1997 LVCSR summer workshop (invited)

1988-94 University of Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany

Master program computer science (includes undergraduate program)

• Minor in mathematics

• Graduate coursework in computational linguistics at University of Stuttgart, Germany

• Graduate level courses in compiler construction and theoretical computer science

• Master thesis on statistical machine translation

• National scholarship from the Friedrich-Naumann Stiftung (based on academic achievement, leadership and social engagement)

Summary of qualifications

1995 - 2001 University of Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany

PhD in computer science, completion expected early 2001

1988 - 1994 University of Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany

Masters in computer science

1986 - 1988 Fernuniversität Hagen Hagen, Germany

Undergraduate work in economics

• Part time distant education program at an accredited university

• Completed several course successfully while doing social service full time

Selected publications

Can be obtained at

www.is.cs.cmu.edu

Journals

Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech, Stolcke, Ries, Coccaro, Shriberg, Bates, Jurafsky, Taylor, Martin, Van Ess-Dykema, Meteer, Computational Linguistics, 2000, 26(3), 339-373

Can Prosody Aid the Automatic Classification of Dialog Acts in Conversational Speech?, Shriberg, Bates, Stolcke, Taylor, Jurafsky, Ries, Coccaro, Martin, Meteer, & Van Ess-Dykema, Language and Speech (1998), 41(3-4), 439-487

International conferences

Shallow Discourse Annotation in CallHome, Klaus Ries, Lori Levin, Liza Valle, Alon Lavie, Alex Waibel, Proceedings of LREC 2000, Athens, Greece, June 2000.

Towards the Detection and Description of Textual Meaning Indicators in Spontaneous Conversations, Klaus Ries, Proceedings of the Eurospeech 99, Budapest, Hungary, September 1999.

Tagging of Speech Acts and Dialogue Games in Spanish, Lori Levin, Klaus Ries, Ann Thyme-Gobbel and Alon Lavie, Proceedings of ACL-99 Workshop on Discourse Tagging, College Park, MD, June 1999.

HMM and Neural Network Based Speech Act Detection, Klaus Ries, ICASSP, Phoenix, Arizona, March 1999.

A Discourse Coding Scheme for Conversational Spanish, Lori Levin, Ann Thyme-Gobbel, Alon Lavie, Klaus Ries, Klaus Zechner, Proceedings of the ICSLP 98, Sydney, Australia, 1998

Linguistically Engineered Tools for Speech Recognition Error Analysis, Carol Van Ess-Dykema, Klaus Ries, ICSLP 98, Sydney, Australia, 1998.

An Automatic Method for Learning a Japanese Lexicon for Recognition of Spontaneous Speech, Laura Mayfield Tomokiyo, Klaus Ries, ICASSP 98.

A Class Based Approach to Domain Adaptation and Constraint Integration for Empirical N-Gram, Klaus Ries, Eurospeech 97, Rhodes, Greece.

The Karlsruhe-VerbMobil Speech Recognition Engine, Michael Finke, Petra Geutner, Hermann Hild, Thomas Kemp, Klaus Ries, Martin Westphal, ICASSP Munich, Germany, 1997

Recognition of Conversational Telephone Speech Using the JANUS Speech Engine, Thurston Zeppenfeld, Michael Finke, Klaus Ries, Martin Westphal, Alex Waibel, ICASSP, Munich, Germany, 1997

Class Phrase Models for Language Modeling, Klaus Ries, Finn Dag Buo, Alex Waibel, ICSLP 96, Philadelphia, USA, 1996

Languages

German (native) and English (fluent and literate), little French and Latin

Experiences

• Elected national student union leader (1 year term, full time), representation at public functions, presenting speeches, organizing conferences, seminars and symposia

• Advised a master thesis on machine learning for speech translation

• Lead multiple seminars, including the official seminar series of the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and seminars at the University of Karlsruhe

• Refereeing papers for major conferences (e.g. NAACL)

Professional skills

• Statistical language modeling for speech recognition

• Dialogue modeling and information retrieval

• Machine learning algorithms

• Programming large projects in language such as C, Perl, Python, SQL and PROLOG

• Database systems and theorem proving