News & Events

Second-year Ph.D. student Ben Kane (supervised by Professor Len Schubert) was awarded the Arts, Sciences and Engineering Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship in recognition of his strong research record, as well as his clear commitment to mentoring, outreach, and service to the department and field. His work has resulted in four conference papers (one as first author) and one journal publication. Much of his research is concerned with creating dialogue capabilities in interactive agents for conversion practice, as well as for question answering about a shared physical setting.  In his more recent work, he has been collaborating with cross-departmental Professor Aaron White from Linguistics on natural logic inferences about beliefs and desires. Ben has also been recognized by faculty and students for his helpfulness, care, and thoroughness as graduate TA –going well beyond the usual TA demands. Professor Schubert has described Ben as an “exceptional doctoral researcher –decidedly among the very best I have interacted with in my 47 years as a Computer Science faculty member.”