Jon Oberlander

Professor of Epistemics in the University of Edinburgh 's School of Informatics. Honorary Professor in Heriot Watt University's School of Mathematical and Computer Science. Fellow of the British Computer Society. First Director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. Member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council. Member of the Board of New Media Scotland. Affiliated to: Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation Human Communication Research Centre HCRC's Language Technology Group.

Publications and CV

• A chronological list of publications is available HTML.
• A category-by-category list of publications is available HTML.
• A CV is available PDF.

Duties 2012-2013

• Officially on sabbatical. And yet.
• Co-Director of the Centre for Design Informatics.
• Academic Director of our living lab for exploring the cultural significance of informatics, Inspace.
• Leader of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance's Smart Tourism Programme.

Doctoral students 2012-2013

• Ed Baggs
• Sara Dalzel-Job
• Clare Llewelyn
• Tamsin Maxwell
• Karl Monsen
• Alexandros Papadopoulos-Korfiatis
• Wolodja Wentland

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 recent EU-funded INDIGO project explored 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 invested dialogue agents with personality, and explored 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), took a deeper look at psycholinguistic processes during multimodal dialogue, and let us develop a new multimodal human-robot dialogue engine. The current EU-funded JAMES project project is building on this, to study the acquisition of social rules for human-robot interaction.

Research colleagues

• 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.

Contacting me: