David Mcdonald Email & Phone Number

Greater Boston Area

At SIFT's Boston office I collaborate on the conception, architecture, and business development of AI systems, with a focus on natural language and the representation of world knowledge. PI on DAPRA Communicating with Computers project. Reading lead and NLP architect on DARPA Big Mechanism project. Ontology designer for OBTW and Stratus DARPA projects. PI on three year ONR basic research grant for constructing language comprehension context dynamically. Previously PI on two phase one SBIR contracts, NLP support on two others.

Greater Boston Area

Intelligent Knowledge Technologies unit: Worked with massive JScheme grammar for parsing Notices to Airmen. Developed architecture for speech-based cognitive systems for characters for immersive deliberate games for training. Architect and ontology designer for DARPA Integrated Learning project. Part of design team for Vulcan project for language-based knowledge entry.

Greater Boston Area

Conceived, prototyped, and implemented a language generation system with novel capabilities for variation, complex natural dialog, and coordination with the emotion and affect of the interactive character it is speaking for. Conceived and specified for team implementation a novel language understanding system that uses the same linguistic resources as the generator. The NLP systems are integrated via a knowledge representation system of my design with special features for NLP.

Designed and implemented event-driven architecture for spoken dialog systems integrating speech recognition engines (ASR), dialog management using Collagen, and text-to-speech (TTS) in a framework that facilitated easily changing choice of speech engines. Evaluated alternative TTS systems, judging relative intelligibility and prosody. Conceived and developed a facility for taking XML descriptions of web forms with their semantic types and automatically creating ASR grammars (for SpeechWorks’ Speech2Go) and dialog task models. Developed tool for plug-and-play Java systems based on Java Beans using reflection. Contributed to development of speech-enabled demonstration applications (TiVo, form filling) as member of speech and Collagen groups. Created a package for flexible word-level text analysis to feed ASR language model and latent semantic analysis engine.

Greater Boston Area

Designed and implemented Java-based client-side grammar-directed editor. Responsible for internationalization including Unicode, Asian fonts, and character encodings. Responsible for encryption facilities for client and server authorization and security and associated customer issues. Handled bug fixes and customer issues anywhere within massive Lisp-based legacy code for the G2 product.

Adjunct position for collaboration on basic research into the compositional semantics of natural language and bi-directional language processing. Designed techniques for language parsing that do not require all semantic patterns to be created in advance. Developed web-based system for viewing students’ transcripts and progress towards meeting University requirements. Lecturer: Artificial Intelligence (fall 1994), Computer Hardware (fall 1995, 1996).

Conceived and implemented a robust and efficient system for extracting targeted information from unrestricted English news articles from online information ser¬vices. Developed high-performance parsers, grammars and semantic models. Prepared application interfaces of the system for clients doing document categorization and doing information extraction to populate databases with relations identified in newspaper texts. Developed a text generation system for rendering event descriptions in data-bases into fluent English. Clients included Coopers & Lybrand, Bolt Beranek & Newman, Digital Equipment Corp, General Electric, Sandia National Laboratories, and Apple.

Developed an integrated system of techniques permitting the analysis of unrestricted English text: application to person/company/title sublanguage in the Wall Street Journal. Extensive product and development planning. Advised higher management on technical feasibility and time-lines.

Reviewed and critiqued system designs, product and marketing plans. Acted as the go-between for management and technical staff. Presentations to clients and potential investors. Carried out due-diligence evaluations. Conceived and prototyped innovative designs for semantic grammar parsing and analysis. Prepared multi-client study on hardware and software technologies for AI and for the state of the art in natural language processing.

Directed seven students through to their Ph.D.'s with topics in language generation, ICAI tutoring, planning, design environments, distributed operating systems, and decision support systems. Taught courses in AI, vision robotics and brain theory, natural language processing, language generation, com¬mon-sense reasoning, Lisp, AI-system design, and assembly language. Chaired the faculty committee for computing resources: planning long-range requirements and overseeing equipment purchases.

Conceived, designed, and implemented the natural language generation system “Mumble”, subsequently carrying it through fourteen years of evolution. Wrote systems for program cross-indexing, Lisp dialect translation, and customized entry to databases. Redesigned Winograd's English grammar for SHRDLU. Research into psycholinguistic models of generation, story understanding, data-directed control.