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George Ferguson
Research Scientist
Arts, Sciences, and Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Areas of expertise: Artificial intelligence; intelligent agents: agent communication languages, agent architectures; user interfaces: speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue, conversational agents
Press contact:
Alan Blank
alan.blank@rochester.edu
585-275-2671
Related Links:
George Ferguson Home Page
News Releases
A Mind Reader? This Computer Understands What You Really Want
July 07, 2003
Biography
George Ferguson studies the future of human-computer interaction to make it more like communication between humans. He works to exploit built-in human mechanisms for conversation and collaboration to develop computer systems that are less like tools and more like assistants. These systems will require no training to use, will adapt to individual users needs and preferences, and will provide knowledge-based support for a wide range of practical tasks. Accomplishing this goal requires fundamental progress on both understanding spoken human language (speech recognition, language understanding, intention recognition, etc.) and on reasoning and performance to support human problem solving (information gathering, planning, evaluation, comparison, etc.)