About

I am currently an associate professor in the Computer Science Department of Boise State University where I principally do research on spoken dialogue systems on embodied platforms. My long-term research goal is to understand what it means for humans to understand, represent, and produce language.  I obtained my PhD in Linguistics at Bielefeld University, Germany. 

Short Bio: I grew up on a dairy farm in rural Ontario, Oregon, U.S.A. After spending two years as a missionary in the Tohoku region of Japan, I received my bachelor's degree in computer science from Brigham Young University. My master's work was done in the Erasmus Mundus European Masters in Language and Communication Technology program, where I spent my first year at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, and my second year at Nancy 2 University (now Lorraine University) in Nancy, France. My thesis was supervised by Professor Martin Kay of Stanford University. During my master's, I worked at the German Institute for Artificial Intelilgence (DFKI). I graduated with a Ph.D from Bielefeld University advised by David Schlangen. During my Ph.D studies, I spent 3 months as an intern at Honda Research Institute, supervised by Kotaro Funakoshi. My post-doctoral work was in the KogniHome project working on dialogue management for an intelligent apartment project.