Professor
Computer Science Department
Rochester, NY 14627-0226


Email: lastname AT cs DOT rochester DOT edu
Fax: (585) 273-4556
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/schubert/

Ph.D. (1970) University of Toronto. Assistant Professor (73-77), Associate Professor (77-84), Professor (84-88); University of Alberta. Professor (88-present), University of Rochester. I am also a member of the Center for Language Sciences (CLS) and the Center for Computation and the Brain.

My research interests center around language, knowledge representation, inference and planning. These interests are tied together by the general goal of developing agents with common sense and the ability to converse and acquire knowledge through language. Some specific topics my students and I have worked on include

Office hours, Spring 2008:

Tuesday and Thursday, 1:00-2:00 (tentative)

Current and recent courses:

CSC 190A/290A (Topics in Computer Science): Machines and Consciousness
CSC 244/444: Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence
CSC 247/447: Natural Language Processing
CSC 280: Computer Models and Limitations
CSC 242: Artificial Intelligence

Present research collaborators:

James Allen: Dialogue processing, agents
Greg Carlson: (Linguistics) Mining general world knowledge from texts
Henry Kyburg: Mining general world knowledge from texts
Alfonso Gerevini (U. Brescia): Scalable temporal reasoning, efficient planning, inferring state invariants in planning
Proshanto Mukherji: Discovery of state invariants in planning domains by exploration
Phil Michalak: General knowledge abstraction from texts, plan/goal recognition
Tom Weingarten (weingart@cs.rochester.edu), URCS undergraduate: Using pulse train to compute probabilities in Bayesian networks

Some past research collaborators:

David Ahn: (Ph.D. 2004, now a Natural Language Scientist at Powerset (LinkedIn):
Semantics/pragmatics of adverbially quantified sentences

Teresa Zollo: (Ph.D. 2003, now at SUNY Geneseo -- new URL):
Recovery from speech recognition errors

Matthew Tong: (B.Sc. 2003, now a doctoral student in Computer Science at UCSD):
Mining general world knowledge from texts

Amon Seagull (Ph.D. 2000, now at Nova Southeastern University, Florida, new URL):
Well-foundedness and reliability in natural language parsing

Aaron Kaplan:, (Ph.D. 2000, now at XRCE, Grenoble, Content Analysis team):
A computational model of belief

Mark Core (Ph.D. 2000, now at U. Edinburgh, Human Communication Research Centre ):
Dialog parsing: From speech repairs to speech acts

Marc Light (Ph.D. 1995, now at Mitre):
Morphological cues for lexical semantics

Massimo Poesio (Ph.D. 1994, now at U. of Essex, U.K.):
Assigning semantic scope to operators in dialogues

Chung Hee Hwang (Ph.D. 1992, now at Motorola's Intelligent Systems Lab in Phoenix, AZ):
A logical approach to narrative understanding, Episodic Logic

Alice Kyburg (Ph.D. 1994, now at U. Wisconsin at Oshkosh):
Pragmatic and semantic accounts of vagueness

Stephanie Schaeffer (M.S. 1988, systems prog., 1988-92, U. Alberta): Temporal reasoning, hybrid reasoning, EPILOG development

Jeffry Pelletier (U. Alberta): Semantic interpretation, semantics of mass terms and generics

Fahiem Bacchus (Ph.D. 1988, now at U. Toronto):
Representing and reasoning about probabilistic knowledge

Caoan Wang (Ph.D. 1988, now at Memorial U. of Newfoundland):
Computational geometry

Professional activities and awards

KR'98 program co-chair
ACL'93 program chair
CSCSI'80 program chair
JAIR editorial board (1996-pres)
Computational Intelligence editorial board (1985-pres)
Computational Linguistics editorial board (1983-5)

Fellow of the AAAI (elected in 1993 for "fundamental contributions in NLP, esp. in the formalization, representation, and practical implementation of non-first order concepts")

Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (1978-9)

Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (1985-88)

Outstanding Contribution award for the KR'89 paper (with C.H. Hwang), "An episodic knowledge representation for narrative texts"

Selected Publications

(underlined titles provide pdf files in most cases)