Conference on Human Impact and Application of Autonomic Computing Systems

Adaptive spoken dialogue with human and computer partners: Implications for autonomic systems Abstract: Autonomic systems demand new metaphors for human-computer interaction. How should people engage in tasks with, monitor the progress of, make attributions to, make predictions about, and ultimately come to trust, systems that learn, that evolve continually, and that are capable of taking initiative? One of the most complex kinds of coordination that people do routinely occurs during conversation. Starting with differences in goals, perspectives, conventions, behaviors, and knowledge, people in conversation manage to make their mental states converge sufficiently to serve their current purposes. They do this via the process of grounding. I will discuss grounding and adaptation in light of research in spoken dialogue and as challenges for autonomic systems.    Susan E. Brennan - Bio  Susan E. Brennan  Associate Professor, Psychology and Computer Science  State University of New York at Stony Brook  susan.brennan@stonybrook.edu  Web Sites  http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/sbrennan-/  http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/psychology/personnel/Susan.htm Biography Professor Brennan holds joint appointments in Psychology and Computer Science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She received her doctorate from Stanford in cognitive psychology and her master's degree from MIT's Architecture Machine Group (aka the Media Lab), where she worked on computer-generated caricatures and teleconferencing interfaces. She has conducted research in NLP dialogue and human-computer interaction at Atari, Apple, and HP Labs. She currently uses behavioral and eye-tracking techniques to study the interpretation and production of spontaneous speech in interactive settings. Her research has been continuously supported by NSF since 1992, totaling over $3.5M in research funding. She is currently Graduate Director in Psychology; in addition to mentoring graduate students, Professor Brennan teaches cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and human factors to undergraduates. Recent keynote and plenary addresses include EDILOG 2002 (Scotland), the 2000 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Hong Kong), and the Elsnet Invited Address at Eurospeech 2001 (Denmark). She serves as associate editor of Discourse Processes and consulting editor of Psychological Science; previously she served as consulting editor of Computational Linguistics.