The Computing Research Laboratory challenges its staff to address complex problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. The CRL internal research staff includes computer scientists, engineers, linguists, mathematicians and psychologists. Among them are 12 Ph.Ds. Faculty and researchers from other departments of the university contribute to the laboratory’s research efforts and co-conduct projects with CRL principal investigators. In addition to their research expertise, CRL staff bring to the laboratory native fluency in 17 major world languages including--besides English--Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, French, German, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Macedonian, Korean, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu. The work of the staff members whose biographies appear here is supported by CRL’s permanent clerical staff and a variety of graduate students.

Following are brief biographies of CRL's core scientific staff. Click on individual names to view personal web pages.

Core Scientific Staff

JAMES R. COWIE is the Director of CRL and has been involved in natural language processing research, in particular, information extraction, since 1980. He was responsible for the development of information extraction systems at CRL for Phase I of the DARPA-sponsored TIPSTER project. These systems processed three domains from newspaper articles: terrorism, joint ventures and micro-electronics. The latter two domains were handled in both Japanese and English. Dr.Cowie managed the MINDS multi-lingual summarization project at CRL and was actively involved in the Expedition, Shiraz translation and Corelli projects. He was a member of the nationwide TIPSTER Architecture Working Group, which produced a standard architecture for combined information retrieval and information extraction systems. He is chair of the NMSU University Research Council for academic year ‘98-99. Dr. Cowie holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom.

DAVID FARWELL is a research specialist in machine translation and natural language processing at CRL. Dr. Farwell is currently participating in the BOAS project, focusing on the development of a framework for describing a human language so as to support the rapid implementation of an analysis component for that language. He has managed the PANGLOSS portion of CRL’s machine translation initiative, involving overall responsibility for the development of a Spanish analysis system and a general knowledge acquisition effort. He was also responsible for the development of a multilingual machine translation system for English, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese (ULTRA). In addition, he is involved in research on the role of pragmatics in natural language interpretation, on the problems of automatic translation of spoken language and the development of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) based on a machine translation engine. Dr. Farwell received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

STEPHEN HELMREICH is a computational linguist at CRL currently working in the areas of machine translation and metaphor in prepositional attitude reports. He was the developer for the German component of the ULTRA machine translation system at CRL and served as the director of the knowledge acquisition group for the PANGLOSS machine translation project and as a principal investigator on the ATT-Meta and Computational Grammars projects. He has research interests in pragmatic approaches to natural language understanding as well as in mathematical linguistics and parsing. Dr. Helmreich holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Purdue University and a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the topic of Referring Functions as Montague Grammar Operators. Dr. Helmreich currently serves on the board of AMTA.

WANYING JIN is a research analyst at CRL. Currently she is working on Croatian-English translation for the Corelli project and on Chinese text analysis for the Mikrokosmos project. In the past, she worked on Chinese-English translation for the ULTRA project and on the Spanish parser for the Pangloss project. She developed the Chinese segmenter for the Norm/Oleada Project. She also worked on the Russian morphology analyzer for Temple project. Her research interests include machine translation, Chinese language processing, morphological analysis and text generation. She graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Physics at Tong Ji University in China. Before joining CRL she was an associate professor at Shanghai University of Technology, China, a visiting scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

MARK LEISHER is a computer specialist on the CRL staff. He specializes in designing and developing software that supports many non-English languages. Mr. Leisher is leading the Pangaea effort to develop UNICODE display, editing and support technology. Mr. Leisher also serves as CRL’s representative to the UNICODE Consortium.

WILLIAM OGDEN is a project manager at CRL and a cognitive psychologist who has been involved in the study of human computer interaction since 1981. As a human factors specialist, he has been involved in all aspects of software interface development, including design, evaluation, prototyping and implementation. While formerly working at IBM, he was involved in the development of user interface guidelines and style guides, conducting IBM seminars related to these issues. He was primarily involved in the design and evaluation of database query interfaces, conducting research evaluating natural language interfaces which led to the publication of a number of articles on this issue. He designed, prototyped and tested a database interface that became part of IBM’s OS/2 software environment. At CRL, Dr. Ogden has successfully applied principles of user participatory design to the development and implementation of many software interfaces, including Cíbola, a translator support system incorporating state-of-the-art linguistic tools. He has designed and developed a suite of tools extensively used by government analysts in DARPA’s TIPSTER text extraction project. He is the author of a GUI builder software package, Tabula Rasa, for text extraction applications. Currently he is managing the Oleada project, a networked integrated multilingual text processing system with flexible tools designed for language analysis and instruction. Currently this system is being used in government language schools and universities to increase the quality of foreign language instruction. He continues to teach the art of user interface design to undergraduate and graduate students at NMSU. Dr. Ogden received his doctorate in psychology from NMSU.

RON ZACHARSKI is working on the Oleada project. He received a B.F.A. in music from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked as a research fellow in the Linguistics Department at the University of Edinburgh examining the pragmatic determinants of intonation and has worked at IBM on speech recognition. His research has examined the relationship between pragmatic factors and linguistic form (particularly, prosodic form and the form of referring expressions).

Adjunct Researchers

KERRY ALT is principle investigator on the ERAD project for Sandia National Laboratories. He has a B.B.A. from Loyola University of the South, an M.M. from Arizona State University and is currently ABD on an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. at New Mexico State University. Before bringing the ERAD project to NMSU in 1992, Mr. Alt served as systems administrator in the Computer Science Dept. Mr. Alt’s research interests include exploration into theories of music cognition and learning, and regular performances as a classical guitarist.

PETER FOLTZ is an assistant professor of psychology at NMSU. His area of study is cognitive and engineering psychology with an emphasis on human-computer interaction, information retrieval, text comprehension and cognitive modeling. Prior to teaching at NMSU, Dr. Foltz was a post-doctoral fellow at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He was also a member of the technical staff of Bell Communication Research's Cognitive Science Research Group. He holds a B.A. in psychology from Lehigh University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

JIM McDONALD is an associate professor of psychology at NMSU. His research areas include cognitive science and engineering psychology with an emphasis on human-computer interaction and interface design. Formerly, Dr. McDonald worked as a human factors engineer for IBM. He has been a research scientist at CRL since 1994. He is also co-founder of ThoughtWare Solutions, Inc., a company specializing in interface design and usability engineering. Dr. McDonald received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from NMSU.

 

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