Department of
Bear Hall, Room
601 South College Road
(910)-962-7182
(910)-962-7457 (fax)
guinnc@uncw.edu
EDUCATION
Ph.D.,
M.S.,
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and
EXPERIENCE
Assistant Professor,
Professor at UNC-Wilmington (2004-present) in the
Department of Computer Science at the
Principal
Investigator, Interactive Virtual Humans, RTI International
Principal Investigator at
Research Triangle Institute (1995-2004) on a National Science Foundation Grant
leading the development of interactive virtual humans with emotions that affect
their body and facial gestures, decision-making, and language generation.
Program leader of RTI’s AVAtalk®
technology creating responsive, individual virtual humans (www.rvht.net). In an
AVAtalk-enabled application,
users carry on spoken conversation with a simulated person (an avatar) and see and hear realistic
responses from the avatar.
Adjunct
Assistant Professor,
Instructor and advisor in
the Department of Computer Science at
Spoken
Natural Language Dialog Systems
Research Engineer at Research Triangle Institute leading the development and integration of natural language dialogue into computer-based training and operational environments. Funded primarily by STRICOM’s ACT II Program, I led the development of a system that allows a trainee or mechanic to talk to a computerized assistant in a virtual reality environment during the diagnosis and repair of equipment. These systems have been implemented on a wide variety of platforms include off-the-shelf personal computers, wearable computers, hand-held computers, and high-end workstations. Specific project domains include maintenance of the M1A1 Abrams tank, orientation training for ship engineering officers, flight training, and point-of-sale tasks.
Human-Computer Collaboration
As Adjunct Assistant
Professor at
Multimedia Tools for Education
Conducted research with Alan
Biermann in the design of multimedia applications for teaching the
relationships among fundamental concepts in Computer Science: machine architecture, assembly language,
higher-level languages, and compilation.
Worked on a team that created software that was used in Duke University
Computer Science courses and made freely available over the internet.
Text Abstraction
Co-adviser to Amit Bagga
(PhD 1998) and Joyce Chai (PhD 1998) on a large corpus text abstraction project
at
Argumentation Theory
Designed and implemented a
model of argumentation that exploits the relationship between high-level
discourse phenomena and low-level syntactic phenomena in its processing of
natural language utterances.
Expert Systems
Conducted
research in conjunction with IBM on developing sales advisory systems.
Semantic Networks
Conducted research with
Terry Nutter (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) in semantic
networks. Ported a semantic network and deduction system (SNePS) to a Symbolics
machine.
“Circle of Champions” award from RTI for
innovative marketing excellence.
James B.
Duke Fellow, Duke University.
Academic All-American.
Golden Key National Honor Society.
Phi Beta
Kappa.
Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Computer Science Honor Society.
Outstanding Lower Division Student, Department of
Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University.
Phi Eta Sigma.
Bronze
Citizenship Award, Awarded by the Sons of the American Revolution.
American
Association of Artificial Intelligence, member.
The
Association for Computational Linguistics, member.
Special
Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial),
member.
Association
for Computing Machinery, member.
Natural Language Processing for Longitudinal Exposure
Data, RTI International, Original Source of Funds: Environmental Protection
Agency, August 1, 2004 – March 31, 2008, $29,586.00.
Responsive
Virtual Human Technology Research, National Science Foundation, #EIA-0121211,
September 2001-August 2004, $ 2,042,547.
Accessibility and
acceptance of responsive virtual human technology as a survey interviewer
training tool, with M. Link, P. Armsby, and R. Hubal,
Computers in Human Behavior 759,
2004.
An Evaluation of Virtual Human Technology in Informational Kiosks, with R. Hubal, Proceedings of International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI ’04), State College, PA, 2004.
A Synthetic Character Application for Informed Consent, W. Visscher, R Hubal, , E. Studer, and D. Sparrow, AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialogue Systems for Health Communication, Washington, DC, 2004.
Psychologically plausible models that drive synthetic character behavior with applications for assessing interaction skills, with R. Hubal, P. Kizakevich, G. Frank, Workshop on Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in System Design, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2004.
Usability
and Acceptability Studies of Conversational Virtual Human Technology, with R. Hubal,
G. Frank, H. Schwetzke, J. Zimmer, S. Backus, R. Deterding,
M. Link, P. Armsby, R. Caspar,
L. Flicker, W. Visscher, A. Meehan, and H. Zelon, 5th SIGdial
Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Boston, MA, 2004.
Integrating
a Crisis Stages Model into a Simulation for Training Law Enforcement Officers
to Manage Encounters with the Mentally Ill, with R. Hubal, G. Frank, and R.
Dupont, Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary
Foundations, Technical Report SS-04-02, pp. 68-69, 2004.
Accessibility
and Acceptance of a Virtual Respondent-Based Interviewer Training Application, with
P. P. Armsby, M. W. Link,
R. Hubal, L. Flicker, and R. A. Caspar, Survey and Statistical
Computing IV. The Impact of Technology on the Survey Process, 2003.
Interactive Soft Skills Training using Responsive
Virtual Human Technology, with R. Hubal, Proceedings of the Interactive
Technologies Conference, Arlington, VA, 2003.
Extracting Emotional Information from the Text of
Spoken Dialog, with R. Hubal, 9th International Conference on
User Modeling,
Lessons
learned in modeling schizophrenic and depressed responsive virtual humans for
training,
with
Hubal, R. and Frank, G., Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on
Intelligent User Interfaces,
Virtual Simulated Patients for Bioterrorism
Preparedness Training, with Paul N.
Kizakevich, Linda Lux, and Steve Duncan, accepted for publication, Proceedings
of the 11th MMVR Conference,
JUST-TALK: An Application of Responsive Virtual
Human Technology, with Geoffrey Frank and Robert Hubal, accepted for
publication, Proceedings of the 24th Interservice/Industry Training,
Simulation and Education Conference, 2002.
A Test
of Responsive Virtual Human Technology as an Interviewer Skills Training
Tool. With Link, M.W., Armsby, P.
P., and Hubal, R. Proceedings of the 2002 Annual Conference of the American
Association for Public Opinion Research, St. Petersburg. 2002.
AVATALK
Virtual Humans for Training with Computer Generated Forces. Proceedings of the
Ninth Conference on Computer Generated Forces. With Hubal, R.C., Frank, G.A.Institute for Simulation & Training:
The Virtual Standardized
Patient–Simulated Patient-Practitioner Dialogue for Patient Interview
Training. With Hubal, R.C. (1st Author), Kizakevich, P.N., Merino,
K.D., & West, S.L. In J.D. Westwood, H.M. Hoffman, G.T. Mogel,
R.A. Robb, & D. Stredney (Eds.), Envisioning
Healing: Interactive Technology and the Patient-Practitioner Dialogue. IOS
Press:
Evaluating Mixed-Initiative
Dialog, IEEE Intelligent Systems,
Volume 14, Number 5, pp. 21-23, 1999.
An Analysis of Initiative Selection in Collaborative
Task-Oriented Discourse, User Modeling and User-adapted Interaction, Vol 8(3-4):255-314, 1998. Also published in Computational Models of Mixed-Initiative Interaction, editors, S.
Haller, S. McRoy, and A. Kobsa, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 89-148, 1999.
Two Dimensional Generalization in Information
Extraction, with Joyce Yue Chai, Alan W. Biermann, AAAI/IAAI, pp. 431-438,
1999.
Natural Language Processing
in Virtual Reality, with R. Jorge Montoya, Modern
Simulation and Training, pp. 44-55, June 1998.
Natural Language Processing
in Virtual Reality Training Environments, with R. Jorge Montoya, in Proceedings of the 19th
Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, 1997.
Goal-Oriented Multimedia
Dialogue with Variable Initiative, with Alan W. Biermann (1st
Author), Michael S. Fulkerson, Greg A. Keim, Zheng Liang, Douglas M. Melamed,
Krishnan Rajagopalan, in International
Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, pp. 1-16, 1997.
Mechanisms for
Mixed-Initiative Human-Computer Collaborative Discourse, in Proceedings of the 34th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1996.
Mechanisms for Dynamically
Changing Initiative in Human-Computer Collaborative Discourse, in Proceedings of the 1996 Human Interaction
with Complex Systems Symposium, 1996.
A Trainable System for the
Extraction of Meaning from Text, with Amit Bagga, Joyce Chai, Alan Biermann,
and Alan W. Hui, in Proceedings of CASCON
’95, 1995.
The Role of
Computer-Computer Dialogues in Human-Computer Dialogue System Development, in Empirical Methods in Discourse
Interpretation and Generation, Technical Report SS-95-06, The AAAI Press,
1995.
Maximally Efficient Dialogue
Mode Algorithm, in Knowledge-Based
Systems, 7(4):277-8, December, 1994.
A Computer Animated System
for Demonstrating Hardware and Software Principles, with Alan Biermann (1st
Author), Dietolf Ramm, David Pennock, Amr Fahmy, and Peter Wu, in Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Southeastern
Small College Computing Conference, Greenville, South Carolina, November
1994.
Visualizing Computation:
Full Color and Motion Demonstration of Computer Mechanisms, with Alan Biermann
(1st Author), Dietolf Ramm, David Pennock, Amr Fahmy, and Peter Wu, in Proceedings of the Fifth National
Conference on College Teaching and Learning, Jacksonville, FL, April 1994.
Teaching a Hierarchical
Model of Computation with Animation Software in the First Course, with Alan
Biermann (1st Author), Amr F. Fahmy, David Pennock, Dietolf Ramm, and Peter Wu,
in SIGSCE '94 Bulletin, 26(1):295-9,
1994.
A Computational Model of
Dialogue Initiative in Collaborative Discourse, in Human- Computer Collaboration: Reconciling Theory, Synthesizing
Practice, Technical Report FS-93-05, The AAAI Press, 1993.
Conflict Resolution in
Collaborative Discourse, with Alan Biermann in Computational Models of Conflict Management in Cooperative Problem
Solving, Workshop Proceedings from the 13th International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence,
A Computational Model of
Collaborative Discourse, with Alan Biermann in Collaborative Problem Solving: Theoretical Frameworks and Innovative
Systems, Workshop Proceedings from AI-ED 93 World Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in Education, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 1993.
Efficient Collaborative
Discourse: A Theory and its
Implementation, with Alan Biermann (1st Author), D. Richard Hipp, and Ronnie
Smith in ARPA Workshop on Human Language
Technology,