Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former vice president of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine artificial intelligence.
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Witbrock was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center and the Informedia Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon.
Witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to Cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including:
- Neural networks
- Multimedia information retrieval
- Genetic design
- Computational linguistics
- Speech recognition
- Web-browser design
His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.
- Witbrock, Michael, Baxter, David, Curtis, Jon, et al. "An Interactive Dialogue System for Knowledge Acquisition in Cyc," in Proceedings of the IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems, Acapulco, Aug 9, 2003.
- O’Hara, Tom, Witbrock, Michael, Aldag, Bjorn, Bertolo, Stefano, Salay, Nancy, Curtis, Jon, and Panton, Kathy. "Inducing Criteria of Lexicalization of Parts of Speech using the Cyc KB," in Proceedings of IJCAI-03, Acapulco August 12–15, 2003.
- Mittal, Vibhu O. and Witbrock, Michael J. "Language Modeling Experiments in Non-Extractive Summarization," Chapter 10 in Croft, W. Bruce and Lafferty, John, Language Modeling for Information Retrieval. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrect, 2003.
- Banko, Michele, Mittal, Vibhu O., and Witbrock, Michael J., "Headline Generation Based on Statistical Translation," in ACL-2000, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, Oct 3-6, 2000.
- Witbrock, Michael J., and Mittal, Vibhu O., "Ultra-Summarization: A Statistical Approach to Generating Highly Condensed Non-Extractive Summaries," in SIGIR’99, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, Aug 15-19, 1999.
- Hauptman, A., Witbrock, M., and Christel, M., "News-on-Demand: An Application of Informedia Technology," d-lib Magazine, The Magazine of the Digital Library Forum, September 1995.
- Fischer, Michael, Meyer, Michael, and Witbrock, Michael. "User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic." Proceedings of the Second International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) '94: Mosaic and the Web, October, 1994.
- Witbrock, Michael and Zagha, Marco. "Back-Propagation Learning on the IBM GF11," Chapter in Przytula, K.W., and Prasanna Kumar, V.K. Parallel Digital Implementations of Neural Networks PTR Prentice Hall. Englewood Cliffs. 1993.
- Witbrock, Michael and Haffner, Patrick. "Rapid Connectionist Speaker Adaptation," Proceedings of the IEEE 1992 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, March, 1992.
Together with John Mount, Witbrock is credited[1] with genetic art, a kind of Computer-generated art.
Perrig, Adrian. "Random Art". USENIX conference page. Retrieved 25 February 2018.
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