Former Research Associate
| foster@in.tum.de | |
| Address | Institut für Informatik VI Technische Universität München Boltzmannstraße 3 85748 Garching bei München Germany |
| Homepage | http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/ |
Research interests
- Natural language generation
- Automated generation of multimodal output
- Embodied conversational agents
- Multimodal and human-robot dialogue systems
- Evaluation of generated output
- Practical implementations of all of the above
Curriculum Vitæ
Education
- 2007: Ph.D., School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
- 1999: M.Sc., Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
- 1997: B.Math. (Computer Science / Combinatorics & Optimization), Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo
Selected employment experience
- April 2009 - present: Research fellow, ECHOES II Project, University of Edinburgh
- January 2006 - March 2009: Research associate, JAST project, Technische Universität München
- May 2002 - April 2005: Research associate, COMIC project, University of Edinburgh
- May 1996 - September 1997: Research assistant/programmer, HealthDoc project, University of Waterloo
- Summer 1995, Winter 1996: Programmer and consultant, MediaServ Inc, Manhattan, New York
- Winter 1994, Fall 1994: Programmer, Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Ontario
Publications
Also see http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/publications.html| [1] | Mary Ellen Foster, Andre Gaschler, and Manuel Giuliani. Automatically classifying user engagement for dynamic multi-party human-robot interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics, Jul 2017. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [2] | Simon Keizer, Mary Ellen Foster, Andre Gaschler, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, and Oliver Lemon. Handling uncertain input in multi-user human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), August 2014. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [3] | Simon Keizer, Mary Ellen Foster, Oliver Lemon, Andre Gaschler, and Manuel Giuliani. Training and evaluation of an MDP model for social multi-user human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, August 2013. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [4] | Mary Ellen Foster, Andre Gaschler, and Manuel Giuliani. How can i help you? comparing engagement classification strategies for a robot bartender. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2013), Sydney, Australia, 2013. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [5] | Manuel Giuliani, Ronald P. A. Petrick, Mary Ellen Foster, Andre Gaschler, Amy Isard, Maria Pateraki, and Markos Sigalas. Comparing task-based and socially intelligent behaviour in a robot bartender. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2013), Sydney, Australia, 2013. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [6] | Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, and Amy Isard. Task-based evaluation of context-sensitive referring expressions in human-robot dialogue. Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013. [ .bib ] |
| [7] | Mary Ellen Foster, Andre Gaschler, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, Maria Pateraki, and Ronald P. A. Petrick. Two people walk into a bar: Dynamic multi-party social interaction with a robot agent. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2012), 2012. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [8] | Manuel Giuliani, Mary Ellen Foster, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Situated reference in a hybrid human-robot interaction system. In Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2010), Dublin, Ireland, 2010. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [9] | Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Amy Isard, Colin Matheson, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. Evaluating description and reference strategies in a cooperative human-robot dialogue system. In Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, California, 2009. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [10] | Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, and Alois Knoll. Comparing objective and subjective measures of usability in a human-robot dialogue system. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009), Singapore, 2009. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [11] | P. Ziaie, T. Müller, M. Foster, and A. Knoll. Using a naive bayes classifier-based on k-nearest neighbors with distance-weighting for static hand-gesture recognition in a human-robot dialog system. In CSICC, March 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [12] | Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin Hill, and Mary Ellen Foster. What tunes accessibility of referring expressions in task-related dialogue? In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2008), Chicago, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [13] | Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin Hill, and Mary Ellen Foster. Who tunes accessibility of referring expressions in task-related dialogue? In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Londial 2008), London, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [14] | Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Thomas Müller, Markus Rickert, Alois Knoll, Wolfram Erlhagen, Estela Bicho, Nzoji Hipólito, and Luis Louro. Combining goal inference and natural-language dialogue for human-robot joint action. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Combinations of Intelligent Methods and Applications, European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Patras, Greece, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [15] | Mary Ellen Foster, Ellen Gurman Bard, Robin L. Hill, Markus Guhe, Jon Oberlander, and Alois Knoll. The roles of haptic-ostensive referring expressions in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2008), pages 295-302, Amsterdam, 2008. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [16] | Mary Ellen Foster. Automated metrics that agree with human judgements on generated output for an embodied conversational agent. In Proceedings of The 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2008), Salt Fork, Ohio, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [17] | Mary Ellen Foster and Colin Matheson. Following assembly plans in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Londial 2008), London, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [18] | Pujan Ziaie, Thomas Müller, Mary Ellen Foster, and Alois Knoll. A naïve Bayes classifier with distance weighting for hand-gesture recognition. In Proceedings of the 13th International CSI Computer Conference (CSICC 2008), Kish Island, Iran, 2008. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [19] | Pujan Ziaie, Thomas Müller, Mary Ellen Foster, and Alois Knoll. Using a naïve Bayes classifier based on k-nearest neighbors with distance weighting for static hand-gesture recognition in a human-robot dialog system. In Proceedings of the 13th International CSI Computer Conference (CSICC 2008), Kish Island, Iran, 2008. [ .bib ] |
| [20] | Mary Ellen Foster. Comparing rule-based and data-driven selection of facial displays. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on Embodied Language Processing, Prague, 2007. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [21] | Mary Ellen Foster. Enhancing human-computer interaction with embodied conversational agents. In Constantine Stephanidis, editor, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International, Part II, volume 4555 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 828-837, Beijing, 2007. Springer. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [22] | Mary Ellen Foster. Generating embodied descriptions tailored to user preferences. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA07), Paris, 2007. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [23] | Mary Ellen Foster. Roles of a talking head in a cooperative human-robot dialogue system. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA07), Poster session, Paris, 2007. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [24] | Mary Ellen Foster. Associating facial displays with syntactic constituents for generation. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Linguistic Annotation Workshop (The LAW), Prague, 2007. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [25] | Mary Ellen Foster. Issues for corpus-based multimodal generation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2007), Aberdeen, 2007. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [26] | Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Corpus-based generation of head and eyebrow motion for an embodied conversational agent. Language Resources and Evaluation, 41(3-4):305-323, 2007. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [27] | Mary Ellen Foster and Michael White. Avoiding repetition in generated text. In Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2007), Schloss Dagstuhl, 2007. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [28] | Markus Rickert, Mary Ellen Foster, Manuel Giuliani, Tomas By, Giorgio Panin, and Alois Knoll. Integrating language, vision and action for human robot dialog systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International, volume 4555 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 987-995, Beijing, China, 2007. Springer. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [29] | Mary Ellen Foster. Dialogue management for cooperative, symmetrical human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Brandial 2006), Potsdam, 2006. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [30] | Mary Ellen Foster. The iCat in the JAST multimodal dialogue system. In Proceedings of the First iCat Workshop, Eindhoven, 2006. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [31] | Mary Ellen Foster, Markus Rickert, and Michael Braun. The JAST collaborative human-robot dialogue system. In Proceedings of CogSys II (Poster session), Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2006. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [32] | Mary Ellen Foster, Tomas By, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Human-robot dialogue for joint construction tasks. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, pages 68-71, Banff, AB, Canada, 2006. [ DOI | .bib | .pdf ] |
| [33] | Mary Ellen Foster, Tomas By, Markus Rickert, and Alois Knoll. Symmetrical joint action in human-robot dialogue. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction for Getting the Job Done, Robotics Science and Systems, Philadelphia, 2006. [ .bib | .pdf ] |
| [34] | Mary Ellen Foster and Jon Oberlander. Data-driven generation of emphatic facial displays. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2006), Trento, Italy, 2006. [ .bib | .pdf ] |