Gregory Aist, GregoryAist@yahoo.com

Research Interests

Education

• Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, December 2000. Language and Information Technologies.
• M.S., Carnegie Mellon University, 1997. Computational Linguistics.
• B.A., Messiah College, 1995. 3.98 GPA overall. Double major in Computer Science (4.0 GPA) and Mathematics (4.0 GPA); minor in Biology (4.0 GPA).

Technical Skills

• Research methods. Prototype development, experiment design and analysis, user testing.
• Programming. 10 years of experience in C++. Other programming languages include perl, Prolog, SQL.
  

Continuing Education / Job-related Training

• Hiring, Supervising, and Retaining Student Employees, June 20, 2001. Carnegie Mellon Human Resources seminar.
• Starting a Technology-Based Venture, March 14 - April 25, 2001. Six-lecture course for faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Observation by Peer Teaching Fellow, Spring 2000. A Teaching Fellow from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence observed and critiqued my lecture on Speech Recognition in 15-381 (Artificial Intelligence).
• Overview of Student Cognition, c. 1998.

Honors and Awards

• IBM Research Fellowship Finalist, 1999.
• National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1996 to 2001.
• Harvey Fellowship, Mustard Seed Foundation and Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities. 1995 to 2000.
• Computational Linguistics Research Fellowship, 1995 to 1998.
• National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention, 1995.
• National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention, 1995
• Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, 1995.
• Messiah College Alumni Award, May 1995. Presented to one graduating student each year.
• Messiah College Senior Merit Award, August 1994. Presented to one student in each class per year.
• American Legion Boys State, 1990.

Positions Held

• Postdoctoral Fellow
  Project LISTEN
  Carnegie Mellon University
  January 2001 - November 2001.
  This postdoctoral period included two months working in Massachusetts helping to initiate a collaboration between Project LISTEN (Jack Mostow, director) at Carnegie Mellon and the Affective Learning Companion group (Rob Reilly, Barry Kort; Roz Picard, P.I.) at the MIT Media Lab. We conducted empirical investigations into the role of emotions in learning: adding human-provided emotional support to Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor, and evaluating the effects of such support on student behavior.
  
  
• Graduate Research Assistant
  Project LISTEN
  Carnegie Mellon University
  February 1996 - December 2000.
  Advisor: Jack Mostow.
  Project LISTEN's goal is to develop a Reading Tutor that uses automated speech recognition to help children learn to read. 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 users, including:
  extending the applied science of spoken dialog in areas such as turn-taking, where my Master's project (1997) developed a novel architecture for taking turns in human-computer spoken dialog, allowing not only alternating turns and user barge-in, but also computer-generated backchanneling and content-driven interruption [Aist ICSLP 1998; see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aist/cv.html for references];
  improving underlying components such as acoustic training on children's speech [Aist et al. ICSLP 1998];
  reviewing the scientific literature in order to extract useful strategies for instruction [Aist Ph.D. proposal 1998];
  operationalizing instructional strategies and turning them into software designs;
  constructing formal analysis, such as a probabilistic model of students' progress through a reading passage [Aist 1997];
  developing or modifying software to implement novel features and maintain prior ones, in languages including C++ and perl;
  soliciting expert feedback, by having a reading researcher watch a videotaped Reading Tutor session and comment on it;
  conducting informal user testing to quickly evaluate user acceptance of proposed interactions;
  evaluating the effectiveness of components as well as overall, both as an individual researcher and as part of a larger team;
  interpreting and presenting results as evidenced by more than 30 publications; and
  transferring research to society as part of CMU's Technology Transfer Office's efforts to license the Reading Tutor to a commercial partner.
  
  
• Carnegie Mellon University
  School of Computer Science
  Teaching Assistant for 15-381 Artificial Intelligence
  January 2000 - May 2000. Professors: Jaime Carbonell, David Cohn.
  Supervised the writing of the midterm exam. Graded homework and exams. Supervised student projects. Gave lecture on Speech Understanding.
  
  
• Macquarie University
  Language Technology Group, Microsoft Research Institute
  Building E6A Room 332, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW Australia
  Visitor, September 1998 - December 1998. Host: Sandra Williams.
  Continued thesis research into spoken dialogs for training children in reading skills. Studied concept-to-speech generation.
  
  
• Microsoft Research
  Speech Technology Group, Microsoft Research, Redmond WA USA
  Research Intern, January 1998 - February 1998. Supervisors: Li Jiang, X.D. Huang
  Trained the Whisper speech recognizer on automatically collected, automatically transcribed children's speech. During this time we showed that training a speech recognizer on these automatically collected and transcribed recorded sentences could improve its accuracy on a variety of different tasks on an test data collected under various acoustic conditions.
  
  
• Cornell University
  Office of Computing and Statistical Consulting
  College of Human Ecology and Division of Nutritional Sciences
  G85 MVR Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853 (607) 255-7678
  Computer Specialist, June 1995 - August 1995. Supervisor: Mel Radcliffe.
  Installed Novell network software and hardware and Internet services software. Provided technical support to IBM and Macintosh users in a high-volume support environment with a 48 hour maximum response time.
  
  
• Messiah College
  Messiah College Computing Services
  Frey Hall, Messiah College, Grantham PA 17027 (717) 766-2511
  Technical Assistant, May 1993 - May 1995. Supervisor: Dave Smith (May 1993-August 1994), Les Weiand (September 1994-May 1995).
  Supported IBM and Macintosh computer labs and multimedia-enabled classrooms. Taught electronic mail, telnet, FTP, word processing, and spreadsheet training classes for faculty, staff, and students. Wrote and edited technical documentation and materials for training courses. Developed a C++ application that would display frames from a laserdisc on a projector while displaying a pre-compiled list of available frames on a computer monitor in front of the instructor. Designed and implemented the first version of the Messiah College World Wide Web server.
  
  Administrative Programmer, May 1992 - May 1993. Supervisor: Bob Felix.
  Wrote database query programs in a fourth generation language called Quiz on the administrative Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputer. Installed Novell network connections. Provided end-user technical support.
  
  Computer Laboratory Proctor, February 1992 - May 1992. Supervisor: Les Weiand.
  Responsible for computer laboratory oversight. Assisted students with technical problems.
  
  
• NCR
  Quality and Engineering Operations
  NCR Ithaca Engineering and Manufacturing, Ithaca NY 14850
  Computer Programmer, May 1990 - August 1991. Supervisor: Dick Bangs.
  Developed and maintained high quality, comprehensive functional and long-term reliability test software for Product Evaluation of point-of-sale printers using multiple communications interfaces. Engineered transition from traditional C and Pascal programming to object oriented programming in the C++ language. Invented and implemented a page description language so that engineers could specify the receipts that they wanted to print at runtime. Added a pull-down menu-driven interface for the program, replacing the old function-key based interface.

Selected Publications and Presentations

Media Coverage

Ph.D. Dissertation

Patents

Chapters in Books

Journal Articles

Conference Proceedings

Workshops and Symposia

Talks and Presentations

Reviews

Professional Activities

Consulting

Professional and Honorary Societies

Past memberships

Service