David Traum

Biography

Dr. David Traum (http://www.ict.usc.edu/~traum) is the Director for Natural Language Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group at ICT. More information about the group can be found here: http://nld.ict.usc.edu/group/ Traum’s research focuses on Dialogue Communication between Human and Artificial Agents. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. These systems have ranged in complexity from simple command and control and system-directed information-providing systems to full mixed-initiative collaborative planning and interaction, and have included both uni-modal (text or speech) and multimodal (gesture, sketching, pointing) systems. One major thrust of research includes the "grounding" problem -- how do communicators realize how well they are understanding each other, and what steps can and should they take to increase this mutual understanding (including giving positive and negative feedback, in a variety of modalities).

Traum has authored over 300 refereed technical articles, is a founding editor of the Journal Dialogue and Discourse, has chaired and served on many conference program committees, and is a past President of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue. Traum earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 1994.