Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

. Witbrock is a native of

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the

Cyc Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...

project in an effort to produce a genuine

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

Background and Affiliations

Dr. Witbrock was born in

Christchurch Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon Rive ...

, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. 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 The Informedia Digital Library is an ongoing research program at Carnegie Mellon University to build search engines and information visualization technology for many types of media.Alexander G. Hauptmann (1997)"Artificial Intelligence Techniques in ...

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. * O’Hara, 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 12–15, 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 SIGIR’99, 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 Conference The ACM Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW) is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was hel ...

(WWW) '94: Mosaic and the Web, October, 1994. * Witbrock, Michael and Zagha, Marco. "Back-Propagation Learning on the IBM GF11," Chapter in Przytula, K.W., and Prasanna Kumar, V.K. Parallel Digital Implementations of Neural Networks PTR Prentice Hall. Englewood Cliffs. 1993. * Witbrock, Michael and Haffner, Patrick. "Rapid Connectionist Speaker Adaptation," Proceedings of the IEEE 1992

International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ICASSP, the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, is an annual flagship conference organized of IEEE Signal Processing Society. All papers included in its proceedings have been indexed by Ei Compendex. The first ICAS ...

, March, 1992.

Random Art

Together with John Mount, Witbrock is credited with genetic art, a kind of Computer-generated art.

References

Sources

Michael Witbrock's Cycorp home page

Cycorp publications - recent publications and downloadable versions in PDF and/or PostScript format

Michael Witbrock's video bibliography

External links

* The current state o

* A publi
version of Cyc
available to researchers
Video Bibliography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Witbrock, Michael Artificial intelligence researchers Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people 1962 births People from Christchurch Lisp (programming language) people American computer businesspeople