Marilyn Walker is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab in the Baskin's School of Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She received her Ph.D. in 1993 in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to UCSC, she was a Professor of Computer Science at University of Sheffield. From 1996 to 2003, she was a Principal Member of Research Staff in the Speech and Information Processing Lab at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. While she was at AT&T, she was a PI on two DARPA projects. The first was the Communicator Evaluation project, where she was the chair of the Evaluation Committee and led the design of the cross-site evaluation experiments with implementation help from NIST. The second project funded by DARPA was the AT&T Communicator project where she developed a new architecture for spoken dialogue systems and statistical methods for dialogue management and generation. She received a DARPA award for her contribution to the evaluation team "Miles Per Watt". Also while at AT&T she received the AT&T Labs Mentoring Award in 2001 for her excellence in mentoring Ph.D. students and junior researchers. At UCSC, her lab is part of the Computational Media Group, whose research focuses on next-generation computer games, incorporating concepts from dramatic theory and social interaction, and notably extending the language capabilities of current interactive games focusing specifically on training, assistive and educational games. She has supervised 6 doctoral students and 10 undergraduate senior theses. She has published over 200 papers, and has 10 granted/pending U.S. patents.
Prof. Marilyn Walker's webpage
Hiroshi Ishiguro received a D.Eng. in systems engineering from the Osaka University, Japan in 1991. He is currently Professor of Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (2009-). He is also visiting group leader (2002-) of Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute and the ATR fellow. He was previously Research Associate (1992-1994) in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University and Associate Professor (1998-2000) in the Department of Social Informatics at Kyoto University. He was also Visiting Scholar (1998-1999) at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He was Associate Professor (2000-2001) and Professor (2001-2002) in the Department of Computer and Communication Sciences at Wakayama University. He then moved to Department of Adaptive Machine Systems in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University as a Professor (2002-2009). His research interests include distributed sensor systems, interactive robotics, and android science. Especially, his android studies are well-known very much in the world.