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.
more background
Ward's research focuses on improving the usability of spoken
dialog systems. When people interact with dialog systems
much of the awkwardness and lost time is due to violations of the
normal conventions for turn-taking. We are discovering and modeling
how people manage turn-taking, and prototyping this and
other ways to make spoken dialogs systems more perceptive, efficient, and effective.
more on dialog systems usability
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 notice and
correctly respond to the turn-taking rules of a new language;
the development of tools for semi-automated analysis of dialog patterns;
and related issues.
more on spoken language and human-computer interaction
