Postdoctoral Position , Beckman Institute, UIUC

[Dan Roth]

                        Postdoctoral Position
                          Beckman Institute
               University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign


The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is seeking a
postdoctoral fellow for a new project funded by the National Science
Foundation's ITR program entitled:

        "Multimodal Human Computer Interaction: 
         Toward a Proactive Computer."

This project involves a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from
Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Education
including Thomas Huang (ECE), David Brown (Ed), David Kriegman (CS),
Steve Levinson (ECE), George McConkie (Psych), and Dan Roth (CS).

The ideal candidate will have a broad vision of the future of human
computer interaction and the technical skills to realize this with
expertise in at least one of the following areas: computer vision,
image processing, speech understanding, natural language, learning,
decision systems, multimedia, or HCI.  The candidate should have a
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field,
should enjoy working with a team of researchers on large and
challenging problems, should have experience in developing large
software systems, and should communicate well in spoken and written
English.

This specific project is based on the belief that, to be more
accessible to the general population, computers must be more proactive
in their interactions with people. In human interaction, someone who
waits for each command before making any communication attempt would
be regarded as uncooperative and unhelpful. In order for a computer to
be more proactive and, thus, to bear its part of the burden of
initiation in interactions, it must have (1) much more real-time
information about its user, and (2) algorithms that select actions
based on this information rather than simply on user commands. The
computer needs information about the user's current and past
emotional, motivational and cognitive state as well as the state of
the task at hand.  Proposed research includes: (1) further development
of methods to sense user postures, movements, expressions and speech;
(2) Learning from multi-modal input; (3) analysis and fusion of this
information to identify and track user states; (4) task state
tracking; (5) creating a corpus of emotion- and action-labeled
videotapes for use with computer learning; (6) further development of
affective communication; (7) development of the basis for
human-centered state-based action decisions; and (8) evaluation of
computer proaction on human behavior and response. The testbed is an
environment for hands-on education in science and engineering, using
the Lego Mindstorms construction and robotics environment, with
children of middle school age. An emphasis will be on developing
proactive computing methods for encouraging interest and conceptual
development of minority children and females, who often show lower
achievement in science. Although the work will be conducted within an
educational environment, the methods developed and studied will be
broadly applicable, and this project should serve as an exemplar of
the type of work that is needed in other computer-aided situations.

Please send a CV and the names of three references to:
        Prof. Dan Roth 
        Dept. of Computer Science
        University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
        1304 Springfield Ave. 
        Urbana, IL  61801
        danr at cs.uiuc.edu