Cécile Paris

Cécile Paris

Role: Senior TPC & Track chair for “Web 2.0, online medical/patient communities of practice and persuasive technology�
Affiliation: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia

Dr Cécile Paris received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence (Natural Language Processing) in 1987 from Columbia University. She joined the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a research laboratory in Marina del Rey (Los Angeles, CA), where she stayed until 1996, working on computational linguistics for knowledge based systems. She then moved to the UK (ITRI, at the University of Brighton, UK), where she worked on multilingual generation systems. She joined CSIRO late 1996. Her main research interests lie in the areas of Language Technology, User Modeling and Human-Computer Interaction. She is particularly interested in flexible and tailored information delivery, automatically generating coherent presentations or briefs (both multi-sentential texts and in the context of dialogues, language and multi-modal) that are optimally informative for their intended users, given the users’ level of domain knowledge, their tasks, their goals, their native language, etc. To this end, she studies language and communication issues and design potentially multilingual and multimodal information delivery systems that tailor their output to users and situations and are able to adapt their behaviour based on feedback from the user. Dr Paris’ thesis research represented the fist major work in user modeling and text generation, and her work on discourse planning for dialogue systems has been the basis for a number of other generation and multimodal presentation systems and research internationally.

An important focus of Dr Paris’ research addresses the practicality of information delivery systems, by looking for ways to automate the acquisition of the various resources that a system requires. More generally, she is interested both in facilitating communication with computers and in understanding how people communicate. Other the past few years, she has been studying issues related to contextualized information delivery, issues related to multilinguality and multimodality, instruction generation, authoring tools, task modeling, and Controlled Natural Languages. The application domains for her work currently include electronic business applications, knowledge management and surveillance.