badwater salt flats, death valley

 

I am a lecturer in Human Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Interaction, Media and Communication research group. My main interest is in the computational semantics and pragmatics of dialogue - using the context of a conversation to build models of what people are actually talking about.

This semester (Jan-Mar 2010) I am teaching Interaction Design (DCS318/AMCM318). Lectures are 10-12am on Fridays, lab sessions 4-6pm on Mondays (see here for my office surgery hours). Materials for the course are available here. There's also a course twitter account to follow for announcements.

In 2010 I will be co-chair for the 14th SemDial workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, to be held in June in Poznań, Poland. This year we're calling it PozDial. In 2009 I was the local organiser for the SIGDIAL 2009 conference on discourse and dialogue, which we hosted here at QMUL.

Before arriving at QMUL in 2009, I worked in the Computational Semantics Lab at CSLI, Stanford, on projects building an automatic meeting-understanding system and a conversational dialogue system for cars. Prior to that I did my PhD at King's College London, looking at clarificational dialogue and what it means for dialogue systems. And before any of this academic stuff, I worked as an engineer in the field of active noise & vibration control, mostly with Ultra Electronics and Noise Cancellation Technologies.

During 2008, I spent a year travelling around Europe, Turkey, North and West Africa with my wife (a professional chef) to learn all about food and its traditions. You can read all about it here.

 
See this Language Log posting on the annihilation of computational linguistics at KCL