Paul Tepper's CV

PAUL A. TEPPER

HOME PAGE: http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/gradstudents/tepper/
EMAIL: ptepper (at) northwestern.edu
Northwestern University
Dept of Communication Studies
2240 Campus Drive
Evanston IL 60208-3525

EDUCATION

September 2003 - Present, PhD Student & Research Assistant, Technology & Social Behavior Joint PhD program in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Media, Technology & Society (Communication Studies), School of Communication & Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University.
- Advisor: Prof. Justine Cassell
- Project Manager for NUMACK project at the ArticuLab. (Duties include supervising up to nine undergraduate research assistants).
- Teaching Assistant for Theories and Technologies for Human Communication, Fall 2004.
October 2002 - September 2003, MSc in Artificial Intelligence, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
- Specialism: Natural Language Engineering
- Dissertation Supervisors: Prof. Johanna D. Moore & Prof. Bonnie L. Webber
September 1998 - May 2002, B.A., Rutgers College, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
- Triple Major: Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Linguistics;
- Minor: Philosophy
- Interdisciplinary Honors Thesis supervised by Prof. Matther D. Stone
1994-1998, Freehold Township High School, Specialized Learning Center for International Studies

HONORS

Standford-Link University of Edinburgh MSc full scholarship
Phi Beta Kappa, Inducted into Rutgers Chapter, 2002
Jerome & Lorraine Aresty Scholar, four year merit scholarship
Rutgers University Outstanding Scholars Program
Rutgers College General Honors Program
Edward J. Bloustein Distinguished Scholars merit scholarship
Rutgers College Dean's List 1999-2002

WORK EXPERIENCE

June - September 2005, Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation.
- Worked on applications for and updates to Midiki, the MITRE Dialogue Toolkit, an Information State-based dialogue management toolkit implemented entirely in Java (http://midiki.sourceforge.net/ ). Applications included the ConnectMe spoken dialogue system, an automatic telephone operator and LDAP interface; a basic natural language interface to X11 wireless devices; and the EMMA system, an embodied, virtual meeting room assistant.
June 2002-August 2002, Research Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania, under Professor Martha Palmer, Paul Kingsbury & Scott Cotton
- Worked on the PropBank project, helping to create a corpus of text annotated with information about basic semantic propositions, annotating syntactic trees of the Penn Treebank with predicate-argument relation information; Word-sense tagging by hand and exploratory work into automatic tagging using statistical methods.
February 2002 ‚ May 2002, Gorgias Press
- Photograph digitization and digital editing in Adobe Photoshop, for publication in reprinted rare books.
December 2000 ‚ May 2002, Research Assistant at the Vision, Interaction, Language, Logic and Graphics Environment (VILLAGE) Lab at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) and the Rutgers University Dept of Computer Science, under Professor Matthew Stone and Dr. Jennifer Venditti.
- Research in computational linguistics & natural language generation technology under Prof. Matthew Stone; Various programming in a Unix environment; Custom stimuli design, hand illustration, computer coloring. Programming in Perl for data processing and analysis of experimental data, for use in psycholinguistic research under Dr. Jennifer Venditti.
2001‚ May 2002, Webmaster for the Rutgers University Dept. of Linguistics home page (http://ling.rutgers.edu).
- Updating and maintenance of an administrative user interface for dynamic content, updates and administration of the dept. web pages. Scripts written in PHP & Javascript. Additional updating of static pages in HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
June 2001, Selected participatant in the 2001 Undergraduate Workshop in Cognitive Science & Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
March 2001 ‚ May 2002, Consultant, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and Dept. of Psychology
- Custom stimuli design, hand illustration, computer coloring. Programming in Perl for data processing and analysis of experimental data, for use in psycholinguistic research under Dr. Karin Stromswold.
1998-1999, Research Assistant/Illustrator, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science
- Designed over 100 black and white illustrations to be used as experimental stimuli for psycholinguistic research under Dr. Julie Boland and Pauline Welby. Familiarized with head-mounted eye-tracking techniques. Computer hardware installation. Consultation on some aspects of experimental design.
1998-present, Freelance cartooning, illustration & caricatures
1998-2000 Lead Artist, Kaman's Art Shoppe's (private concession at Six Flags Great Adventure, Jackson, NJ). 2000-present - Freelance cartooning & illustration
- Caricature Artist. Experience in humorous cartooning, as well as managing artists and scheduling.

PUBLICATIONS

Kopp, Stefan, Tepper, Paul, Ferriman, Kim and Cassell, Justine. (In Press). "Trading Spaces: How Humans and Humanoids use Speech and Gesture to Give Directions." in Engineering Approaches to Conversational Informatics. T. Nishida (Ed.), John Wiley & Sons: Chicester, England.

Huffaker, David, Jorgensen, Joseph, Iacobelli, Francisco, Tepper, Paul and Cassell, Justine. (2006). Computational Measures for Language Similarity across Time in Online Communities. In the Workshop on Analyzing Conversations in Text and Speech (ACTS) at HLT-NAACL, June, 8, New York City, NY.

Striegnitz, Kristina, Tepper, Paul, Lovett, Andrew and Cassell, Justine. (2005). "Knowledge Representation for Generating Locating Gestures in Route Directions." In the Proceedings of the Workshop on Spatial Language and Dialogue (5th Workshop on Language and Space). October 23-25, Delmenhorst, Germany.

Kopp, Stefan, Tepper, Paul and Cassell, Justine. (2004). "Towards Integrated Microplanning of Language and Iconic Gesture for Multimodal Output." In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) 2004. Oct. 14-15, Penn State University, State College, PA.*

Tepper, Paul, Kopp, Stefan, and Cassell, Justine. (2004) "Content in Context: Generating Language and Iconic Gesture without a Gestionary." In the Proceedings of the Workshop on Balanced Perception and Action in ECAs at Automous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) '04. New York, NY.*

Discourse Constraints on the Interpretation of Nuclear-accented Pronouns, (2002). Jennifer J. Venditti, Matthew Stone, Preetham Nanda and Paul Tepper. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Speech Prosody. Aix-en-Provence, France.

*(Papers that I presented orally.)

INVITED TALKS

Towards Integrated Microplanning of Language and Gesture for Direction Giving.Computational Linguistics Lunch (CLunch) Talk Series. University of Pennsylvania, Dept of Computer Science, Jan 24, 2005, Philadelphia, PA.

Generating Language and Gesture for Direction Giving. Workshop on Modeling Communication with Robots and Virtual Humans. Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, April 5, 2006, Bielefeld, Germany.

SOME RELEVANT COURSEWORK

Undergraduate topics:Object-oriented programming, linear algebra, discrete mathematics, logic, formal languages & automata, cognitive science, programming languages, data structures, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, artificial intelligence, probability, compilers, parsing, numerical analysis, algorithm design & analysis. Linguistics coursework: syntax, phonology, language typology, optimality theory, acquisition, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, intonation (ToBI coding system), discourse representation theory (DRT), Tree- Adjoining Grammar (TAG)
Graduate Coursework: Artificial Intelligence; Semantics (Extensional &ampl Intensional); Computational Linguistics & Natural Language Processing; Probabilistic Modeling & Reasoning; Machine Learning; Grammatical formalisms for theoretical and computational linguistics; Speech Recognition & Synthesis; Research methodologies; XML, Markup languages & document management; Data-intensive, Statistical methods in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing; Dialogue Systems; Natural Language Generation; Natural Language & Speech Systems Design (Question &Answering systems); Advanced Techniques in Natural Language Processing; Statistics & Experimental Design; Discourse Analysis; Nonverbal Behavior; Observational and Ethno- Methodologies; Interpersonal Communications; Human-Computer Interaction; Knowledge Representation; History of Information & Communication Technologies

SKILLS

Programming languages: Prolog, Perl, Python, Java, C++, C, Scheme/LISP, PHP, Matlab
Operating systems: UNIX/Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and DOS
Document & Web Design in XML, PHP, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and LaTeX 2e
Video editing and annotation (TASX, Anvil, VirtualDub, AviSynth)
Speech synthesis with Festival
Speech Recognition using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK), and Java APIs for Nuance, ViaVoice
Waveform & spectral acoustic analysis with Xwaves and Praat
Familiarity with table-mounted and head-mounted eye-tracking techniques for use in experimental psycholinguistic research
Certified to conduct research involving human subjects by Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research at Rutgers University and Northwestern University
Computer hardware and software installation and maintenance
Custom graphic design and photo editing with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
Page Layout with Quark Express and Adobe Pagemaker
Freelance illustration, clip art design, cartoons and caricatures

SERVICE & EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Served as a reviewer for the following Journals, Conferences and Workshops:
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Annual Conference
- International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
- Journal of Bioinformatics
- International Journal of Humanoid Robotics (IJHR)
- Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
- Interacting With Computers: The interdisciplinary journal of Human-Computer Interaction
October 2002 - September 2003, MSc Staff-Student Liaison, School of Informatics, U. of Edinburgh
Spring 1999 - May 2002, Executive Board member of Rutgers University's Amnesty International student group
2000- May 2002, Executive board member of the Rutgers University Cognitive Science Club
2000- May 2002, President of the Rutgers University Undergraduate Language & Linguistics club
1999-2000, Executive board member of the Cartoonist's Association of Rutgers, editor of John Doe Comics

REFERENCES

Dr. Justine Cassell, Professor, Dept. of Communication Studies, Northwestern University (justine - at -- northwestern.edu)
Dr. Matthew Stone, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University (mdstone -at-- cs.rutgers.edu)
Dr. Karin Stromswold, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Psychology & Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, (karin -at- ruccs.rutgers.edu)
Dr. Bruce Tesar, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Linguistics & Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, (tesar -at- ruccs.rutgers.edu)

Dr. Jennifer Venditti, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, Columbia University (jjv -at-- cs.columbia.edu)
Dr. Johanna D. Moore, Professor, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (j.moore --at- ed.ac.uk)
Dr. Bonnie L. Webber, Professor, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (bonnie -at-- ed.ac.uk)