Jon Oberlander

Affiliations

• Professor of Epistemics in the University of Edinburgh 's School of Informatics.
• Fellow of the British Computer Society.
• Affiliated to:
  • Institute of Communicating and Collaborative Systems;
  • The ESRC Human Communication Research Centre;
  • HCRC's Language Technology Group; and
  • 
• Member of the board of New Media Scotland.

Publications and CV

• A chronological list of publications is available HTML .
• A short CV is available PDF.

Duties 2008-09

• Director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance.
• Director of InSpace, our new living lab: making research visible.

Research interests

• My main interests lie in the intersection of computational linguistics and cognitive science. The primary aim is to develop cognitively-motivated computational and formal models of the ways in which differing people produce fluent discourse. Such models underpin the proper design of systems presenting data and teledata to users, tailoring it to their individual needs and interests.
• There are three main strands to my current research: discourse generation, individual differences, and multimodality.
  1. Intelligent Labelling. With Chris Mellish, Colin Matheson, Amy Isard and others, I have worked on `intelligent labelling': the automatic tailoring of personalised text in electronic catalogues, through two EPSRC-funded projects. By combining techniques from natural language generation, hypertext, and user modelling, ILEX provides a core system for dynamic hypertext generation, and demonstrates its utility both for exploring museum collections, and browsing home shopping catalogues. The successful EU-funded MPIRO project investigated a generalisation of the approach, to support multilingual generation, and the current EU-funded INDIGO project explores multilingual, multimodal human-robot interaction in museums.
  2. Affect in Communication. Recently, I have been focussing on modelling personality-based differences in discourse generation; this has led to publications with Alastair Gill, interests in personality and blogging, pursued with Scott Nowson, a patent application, and project funding through the Stanford Link. The CrAg project on Critical Agent Dialogues has been about investing dialogue agents with personality, and seeing how this affects the ways they adjust their behaviour to each other---and whether human observers like watching particular kinds of dialogue.
  3. Multimodal reasoning and communication. With Keith Stenning and colleagues, I have investigated the relationships between graphicality and expressiveness. Combining diverse research methods, we have shown how differing multimodal presentations of the same material affects the ways that people with differing cognitive styles learn new formal systems.The MAGIC project, in collaboration with Pat Healey in London, Simon Garrod in Glasgow, and John Lee in Edinburgh, explored how conventions in the use of graphical notations arise from sequences of individual interactions. With Mary Ellen Foster and others, the EU-funded COMIC project (COnversational Multimodal Interaction with Computers) let us put intelligent labelling ideas from generation and synthesis (see above) together with those on multimodal interaction and problem solving. The EU-funded JAST project (Joint Action Science and Technology), takes a deeper look at psycholinguistic processes during multimodal dialogue, and has let us develop a new multimodal human-robot dialogue engine.

Research associates and students

• Alastair Gill
• Scott Nowson
• Mary Ellen Foster

Miscellaneous

• What is "Epistemics?" Tradition has it that the term was invented by Christopher Longuet-Higgins. If you consult the 1977 Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, you will find on page 209 the following definition:

  epistemics. Word coined at Edinburgh University in 1969 with the foundation of the School of Epistemics. It signifies the scientific study of knowledge, as opposed to the philosophical theory of knowledge, which is known as epistemology. A more extended definition of epistemics is 'the construction of formal models of the processes - perceptual, intellectual, and linguistic - by which knowledge and understanding are achieved and communicated'. C.L.-H.

  This is more detailed than, but consistent with, the definition offered by MSN Encarta.

• Nick Haddock - consultant working in search, text mining and natural language processing.
• The Grange Association.
• Laurel Bank Tea Room

Contacting me: