Michael Witbrock
Encyclopedia
Michael Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence
. A native of New Zealand
, he currently lives in Austin, Texas
, and is the current Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc
project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence
.
, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University
. Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center
and the Informedia Digital Library
at Carnegie Mellon.
His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. A native of New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, he currently lives in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, and is the current Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc
Cyc
Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning....
project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
.
Background and Affiliations
Dr. Witbrock was born in ChristchurchChristchurch
Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...
, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
. Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center
Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center
Also known as JPRC and Just Research, Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center was a late-1990's computer science research laboratory in Pittsburgh, loosely associated with Carnegie Mellon University. Its director was Dr...
and the Informedia Digital Library
Informedia Digital Library
The Informedia Digital Library is an ongoing research program at Carnegie Mellon University to build search engines and information visualization technology for many types of media...
at Carnegie Mellon.
Research Topics
Dr. Witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to Cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including:- Neural networks
- Multimedia information retrieval
- Genetic design
- Computational linguistics
- Speech recognition
- Web-browser design
His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.
Selected publications
- Witbrock, Michael, Baxter, David, Curtis, Jon, et al. "An Interactive Dialogue System for Knowledge Acquisition in Cyc," in Proceedings of the IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems, Acapulco, Aug 9, 2003.
- O’Hara, Tom, Witbrock, Michael, Aldag, Bjorn, Bertolo, Stefano, Salay, Nancy, Curtis, Jon, and Panton, Kathy. "Inducing Criteria of Lexicalization of Parts of Speech using the Cyc KB," in Proceedings of IJCAI-03, Acapulco August 12–15, 2003.
- Mittal, Vibhu O. and Witbrock, Michael J. "Language Modeling Experiments in Non-Extractive Summarization," Chapter 10 in Croft, W. Bruce and Lafferty, John, Language Modeling for Information Retrieval. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrect, 2003.
- Banko, Michele, Mittal, Vibhu O., and Witbrock, Michael J., "Headline Generation Based on Statistical Translation," in ACL-2000, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, Oct 3-6, 2000.
- Witbrock, Michael J., and Mittal, Vibhu O., "Ultra-Summarization: A Statistical Approach to Generating Highly Condensed Non-Extractive Summaries," in SIGIR’99, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, Aug 15-19, 1999.
- Hauptman, A., Witbrock, M., and Christel, M., "News-on-Demand: An Application of Informedia Technology," d-lib Magazine, The Magazine of the Digital Library Forum, September 1995.
- Fischer, Michael, Meyer, Michael, and Witbrock, Michael. "User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic." Proceedings of the Second International World Wide Web ConferenceWorld Wide Web ConferenceThe International World Wide Web Conference is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web...
(WWW) '94: Mosaic and the Web, October, 1994. - Witbrock, Michael and Zagha, Marco. "Back-Propagation Learning on the IBM GF11," Chapter in Przytula, K.W., and Prasanna Kumar, V.K. Parallel Digital Implementations of Neural Networks PTR Prentice Hall. Englewood Cliffs. 1993.
- Witbrock, Michael and Haffner, Patrick. "Rapid Connectionist Speaker Adaptation," Proceedings of the IEEE 1992 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal ProcessingInternational Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal ProcessingICASSP, the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, is an annual research conference organised by the IEEE....
, March, 1992.
External links
- The current state of the genetic art project
- A public version of Cyc available to researchers
- Video Bibliography