Archived News

  • November 2016: Invited panelist at AI XPRIZE + Pittsburgh's AI Experts
  • November 2016: Teams Corpus (multi-party and multi-modal dialogue entrainment) is now available for scientific purposes (download)
  • November 2016: Invited speaker at NSF-supported EMNLP workshop on Uphill Battles in Language Processing: Scaling Early Achievements to Robust Methods
  • July 2016: NLP blog features Wencan Luo's paper as a NAACL16 pick
  • May 2016: Congratulations to Huy Nguyen for winning the Best Student Paper Award at the 29th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society. (Huy with the PC chairs and his award)
  • April 2016: ArgumentPeer video
  • Spring 2016: Congratulations to Wencan Luo and Huy Nguyen, whose papers represent 2 of the 3 nominees for Best Student Paper at the 29th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society.
  • March 2016: Congratulations to Wencan Luo for being awarded a Mellon Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year. Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowships are awarded to s tudents of exceptional ability and promise who are enrolled or wish to enroll at the University of Pittsburgh in programs leading to the Ph.D. in various fields of the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences.

  • Fall 2015: Shaw Visiting professor, Computer Science Department, National University of Singapore
  • August 2015: Elected to 3 year term as Councilor, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
  • August 2015: Summarizing Student Reflection Corpus is now available for scientific purposes (download)
  • January-April 2015: Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University

  • December 2014: Michael Lipschultz defends his dissertation! (The Defense)
  • September 2014: ISCA Best Paper Published in Speech Communication (2011-2013) for "Benefits and challenges of real-time uncertainty detection and adaptation in a spoken dialogue computer tutor"
  • September 2014: Keynote Speaker, Fifth International Conference on Computational Models of Argument
  • August 2014: Wenting Xiong defends her dissertation! (The Defense)
  • May 2014: Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Award
  • May 2014: Invited Speaker, Computational Linguistics and Educational Technology
  • Winter 2014: Google Faculty Research Award (Natural Language Processing) (Pitt Chronicle listing)

  • September 2013: CS Department Teaching Award, graduate seminar category
  • September 2013: Invited Speaker, Cambridge English Centenary Symposium on Speaking Assessment
  • August 2013: Keynote Speaker, SLaTe Workshop (Speech & Language Technology in Education)
  • May 2013: LRDC turns 50 (see Today section)
  • May 2013: Jesse Thomason was selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (male) for 2013
  • April 2013: Jesse's goodbye lunch

  • July 2012: Keynote Speaker, 13th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (video)
  • April 2012: Heather's goodbye lunch
  • January 2012: Alum Joanna Drummond is one of 10 receipients of Microsoft's Graduate Women's Scholarship Program

  • Summer 2011: Pitt Magazine features NLP faculty!
  • August 2011: Awarded Senior Member status by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI and Pitt announcements)
  • May 2011: Joanna's goodbye lunch
  • April 2011: Congratulations to Joanna Drummond, who was selected to receive a 2011 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship. Her selection was based on "outstanding abilities and accomplishments, as well as ... potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the US science and engineering enterprise."
  • March 2011: U. of Pittsburgh participant in IBM Watson comes to Pitt and CMU; Pitt Panel; IBM Interview and CMU Q/A; Converge article
  • March 2011: Congratulations to Heather Friedberg and Mike Lipschultz for their awards (Outstanding CS Student, and Digital Media, respectively) at the 11th Annual Computer Science Day
  • March 2011: Congratulations to Wenting Xiong for being awarded a Mellon Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year. Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowships are awarded to students of exceptional ability and promise who are enrolled or wish to enroll at the University of Pittsburgh in programs leading to the Ph.D. in various fields of the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences.

  • November 2010: Heather Friedberg was selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for 2011
  • September 2010: Heather Friedberg was awarded the 2010 Google Engineering Intern Scholarship. The recipients are selected from Google Summer 2010 Engineering interns in North America and evaluated on their academic achievements, community involvement, and leadership accomplishments. Also, congratulations to Mike Lipschultz for receiving the runner-up 2010 Taulbee Award for Excellence in Computer Science. The award recognizes teaching excellence and academic progress towards a PhD.
  • June 2010: Art Ward (6/23/10) defends his dissertation! The defense. The committee/toast. The door.
  • June 2010: Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Do Micro-Level Tutorial Decisions Matter: Applying Reinforcement Learning to Induce Pedagogical Tutorial Tactics (by Chi, VanLehn and Litman)
  • June 2010: The James Chen Award for for the best student paper at the 13th International Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization for Inducing Effective Pedagogical Strategies Using Learning Context Features (by Chi, VanLehn, Litman and Jordan)
  • May 2010: Hua and Min after the hooding, Commencement 2010
  • March 2010: Congratulations to Joanna Drummond, for winning the 10th Annual CS Day Award for Best Undergraduate Student Poster. Link to the poster, and to a related photo. Congratulations also to Heather Friedberg for making the Undergraduate Honor Roll.

  • December 2009: Congratulations to Mike, Wenting, and Joanna on their First Place Door award at the CS Department's Holiday Door Decorating Contest. Details on the door and the prizes can be found here.
  • November 2009: Min Chi defends her dissertation! Min and committee chairs. Preparing the toast. MDP power.
  • November 2009: University Times and School of Arts and Sciences on latest NSF award
  • October 2009: Michael Lipschultz was awarded the CS Department's 2009 Taulbee Award for Excellence in Computer Science. The award recognizes teaching excellence and academic progress towards a PhD. (In 1966, Orrin Taulbee founded Pitt's Department of Computer Science and served as its chair until 1984. In October 1989, the four sons of Dr. Taulbee initiated this award in memory and honor of their parents.)
  • September 2009: Hua Ai defends her dissertation! The Defense. Committee Toast.
  • September 2009: Best Student Paper award nominee at Sigdial 2009 for Discourse Structure and Performance Analysis: Beyond the Correlation by Rotaru and Litman.

  • September 2008: Mihai Rotaru defends his dissertation! The Defense. Commencement. With NLP faculty.
  • June 2008: Uncertainty Corpus is now publically available for scientific purposes (by request) through the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center's Datashop.
  • August 2007 - July 2008: Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Edinburgh (Informatics). Contact details. Here is my Lecture Series.
  • April 2008: Invited Speaker, Affective Language in Human and Machine Symposium of the AISB Convention
  • February 2008: Distinguished Lecturer, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

  • June 2007: ITSPOKE part of U. of Pittsburgh Exhibition, Coalition for National Science Funding, Capitol Hill.
  • May 2007: Ryoko Tokuhisa (Toyota Central R&D Labs) visits our group for three weeks. Group photo, burger initiation.
  • April 2007: Best Paper Award (Late-Breaking News) at HLT-NAACL 2007 for Exploring Affect-Context Dependencies for Adaptive System Development by Forbes-Riley, Rotaru, Litman, and Tetreault. Here are the awards, Mihai getting his award, and Kate giving the presentation.
  • February 2007: Congratulations to Greg Nicholas for winning the 2007 CS Day Undergraduate Student Poster Competition (both the Judged and People's Choice Awards). Here is the winning poster.

  • November 2006: Greg Nicholas was selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2007
  • September 2006: People's Choice Best Paper Award for Discourse Structure and Speech Recognition Problems (by Mihai Rotaru and Diane Litman), Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech/ICSLP), 2006
  • July 2006: Invited Speaker, 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
  • June 2006: Keynote Speaker, Human Language Technology Conference/North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (ppt)
  • March 2006: Congratulations to Art for being awarded a Mellon Fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year. Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowships are awarded to students of exceptional ability and promise who are enrolled or wish to enroll at the University of Pittsburgh in programs leading to the Ph.D. in various fields of the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences.
  • February 2006: Congratulations to Amruta for winning the 2006 CS Day Graduate Student Poster Competition, People's Choice Award! Here is the winning poster.

  • February 2005: Congratulations to Mihai for winning the 2005 CS Graduate Student Research Competition! Here is the group (minus one) toast.

  • June 2004: Teaching Computers to Teach Like Humans, Pitt Chronicle, June 7 2004