Nigel G. Ward received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. He was on the faculty of the University of Tokyo for ten years before joining UTEP in 2002. He has served on NSF panels on speech and language processing and on learning technologies, and has organized several workshops on dialog dynamics, including the upcoming Workshop on Feedback Behaviors in Dialog.

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Ward's research areas are at the intersection of spoken language and human-computer interaction. Current topics include the subtle non-lexical and prosodic signals that enable inference of a dialog partner's needs, intentions, and feelings at the sub-second level; techniques for modeling these phenomena; and applications of the models for more accurate speech recognition, for more natural utterances, and for more responsive dialog systems. These projects apply multiple methods --- statistical, linguistic, systems-building, and experimental --- towards the goal of providing truly outstanding user experiences.

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• themes in dialog systems usability