Computer Science Distinguished Lecture with Martha E. Pollack
Martha E. Pollack
University of Michigan
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering
Faculty Host: Shlomo Zilberstein
"Intelligent Assistive Technology: The Present and the Future"
Recent advances in two areas of computer science wireless sensor networks and AI inference strategies have made it possible to envision a wide range of technologies that can improve the lives of people with physical, cognitive, and/or psycho-social impairments. Indeed, some of these same “assistive technologies” can also be a boon for people without impairments. This talk will survey current projects aimed at the development of intelligent assistive technology and will speculate about future design challenges and opportunities.
Martha E. Pollack is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where she also chairs the Computer Science and Engineering Division. She received her B.A. degree from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and has been a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and a research staff member at the AI Center at SRI International. Pollack has conducted research in the areas of automated planning and execution monitoring, temporal reasoning and constraint satisfaction, and natural-language processing, as well as on assistive technology for cognitively impaired people. In April of 2004 she testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging about the potential value of assistive technology in an aging world.
Pollack is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award (1991), an NSF Young Investigator's Award (1992), and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award (2000). She was program chair for IJCAI-97, is or has been on the editorial boards of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, AI Magazine, the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and Computational Linguistics, and was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2001-2005.
