Nigel Ward received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1991. He was a faculty member at the
University of Tokyo for ten years before joining UTEP in 2002. He
has served on NSF panels on Language Processing and on Learning Technologies,
and was an organizer of the Special Session on the Prosody of Turn-Taking and Dialog Acts at Interspeech 2006.
Ward's research areas lie in the intersection of spoken language and
human-computer interaction. One focus is improving the usability of spoken
dialog systems.
Other interests include the modeling of `real-time social skills',
including ways to infer a dialog partner's needs,
intentions, and feelings at the sub-second level from
subtle non-verbal signals;
the development of software to teach how to
correctly respond to the turn-taking rules of a new language;
and the development of tools for semi-automated analysis of dialog patterns.
| Advisees | Jaime C. Acosta, Chris Cuellar, Jagadish Dandu, Rafael Escalante, Nisha Kiran, Muhannad Manshad, Alejandro Vega.
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| Former Students and Former Affiliations |
