michael witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. a native of new zealand, he currently lives in austin, texas, and is the current vice president of research at cycorp, which is carrying out the cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine artificial intelligence. == background and affiliations == dr. witbrock was born in christchurch, new zealand, and has a ph.d. in computer science from carnegie mellon university. before joining cycorp, he was a principal scientist at terra lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding web user behavior; he has also been associated with just systems pittsburgh research center and the informedia digital library at carnegie mellon. == research topics == dr. witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including: * neural networks * multimedia information retrieval * genetic design * computational linguistics * speech recognition * web-browser design his work at cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the cyc project. == selected publications == * witbrock, michael, baxter, david, curtis, jon, et al. "an interactive dialogue system for knowledge acquisition in cyc," in proceedings of the ijcai-2003 workshop on mixed-initiative intelligent systems, acapulco, aug 9, 2003. * oâhara, tom, witbrock, michael, aldag, bjorn, bertolo, stefano, salay, nancy, curtis, jon, and panton, kathy. "inducing criteria of lexicalization of parts of speech using the cyc kb," in proceedings of ijcai-03, acapulco august 12â15, 2003. * mittal, vibhu o. and witbrock, michael j. "language modeling experiments in non-extractive summarization," chapter 10 in croft, w. bruce and lafferty, john, language modeling for information retrieval. kluwer academic publishers, dordrect, 2003. * banko, michele, mittal, vibhu o., and witbrock, michael j., "headline generation based on statistical translation," in acl-2000, proceedings of the 38th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, hong kong, oct 3-6, 2000. * witbrock, michael j., and mittal, vibhu o., "ultra-summarization: a statistical approach to generating highly condensed non-extractive summaries," in sigirâ99, proceedings of the 22nd international conference on research and development in information retrieval, berkeley, ca, aug 15-19, 1999. * hauptman, a., witbrock, m., and christel, m., "news-on-demand: an application of informedia technology," d-lib magazine, the magazine of the digital library forum, september 1995. * fischer, michael, meyer, michael, and witbrock, michael. "user extensibility in amiga mosaic." proceedings of the second international [[world wide web c
Artificial_intelligence_researchers Carnegie_Mellon_University_alumni Living_people People_from_Christchurch