Publications by George Ferguson

From 1989 to 2013, I was part of a fantastic inter-disciplinary team from the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester working at the intersection of Cognitive Science and Computer Science. We developed Intelligent Conversational Assistants based on deep, formal models of natural language understanding and collaboration. We applied these to problems ranging from logistics to health care to command and control. This page is a comprehensive (I hope) list of all my academic publications during that time.

2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010
2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 |
1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995 | 1994 | 1993 | 1992 | 1989

2013

Lasecki, W. S., Weingard, L., Bigham, J. P., and Ferguson, G. (2013). Crowd formalization of action conditions. Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13), Student Abstracts. Bellevue, WA.
Lasecki, W. S., Weingard, L., Bigham, J. P., and Ferguson, G. (2013). Finding action dependencies using the crowd. International Conference on Knowledge Capture (KCAP-2013), Posters. Banff, Canada.

2012

Lasecki, W.S., Bigham, J.P., Allen, J.F., and Ferguson, G. (2012). Real-time Collaborative Planning with the Crowd. In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2012). Toronto, Canada. [PDF]
Swift, M., Ferguson, G., Galescu, L., Chu, Y., Harman, C. Jung, H., Perera, I., Song, Y. S., Allen, J., and Kautz, H. (2012). A multimodal corpus for integrated language and action. Proceedings of the International Workshop on MultiModal Corpora for Machine Learning, pp. 14-17, Istanbul, Turkey. [PDF]
Blaylock, N., de Beaumont, W., Galescu, L., Jung, H., Allen, J., Ferguson, G., and Swift, M. (2012). Play-by-play learning for textual user interfaces. In Applied Natural Language Processing: Identification, Investigation, Resolution, McCarthy, P. M., and Boonthum-Denecke, C. (eds.), pp. 351-364. IGI Global. [doi:10.4018/978-1-60960-741-8]

2011

Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. (2011). A Cognitive Model for Collaborative Agents. Proceedings of the AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Washington, DC. [PDF]

2010

Jung, H., Allen, J., de Beaumont, W., Blaylock, N., Ferguson, G., Galescu, L., Swift, M. (2010). Going Beyond PBD: A Play-by-Play and Mixed-initiative Approach. No Code Required: Giving Users Tools to Transform the Web, Cypher, A., Dontcheva, M., Lau, T., and Nichols, J. (eds.). Morgan Kaufmann.
Blaylock, N., de Beaumont, W., Galescu, L., Jung, H., Allen, J., Ferguson, G., and Swift, M. (2010). Learning Collaborative Tasks on Textual User Interfaces. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-23). Daytona Beach, FL. May 19-21. [PDF]
Ferguson, G., Quinn, J., Horwitz, C., Swift, M., Allen, J., and Galescu, L. (2010). Towards A Personal Health Management Assistant. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 43(5): S13-S16. [doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2010.05.014] [PDF]

2009

Ferguson, G., Allen, J., Galescu, L., Quinn, J., and Swift, M. (2009). CARDIAC: An Intelligent Conversational Assistant for Chronic Heart Failure Patient Heath Monitoring. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Virtual Healthcare Interaction, Arlington, VA, November. [PDF]
Galescu, L., Allen, J., Ferguson, G., Quinn, J., and Swift, M. (2009). Speech Recognition in a Dialogue System for Patient Health Monitoring. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine (BIBM-2009) Workshop on NLP Approaches for Unmet Information Needs in Health Care Submission, Washington, DC, November. [PDF]
Jung, H., Allen, J., de Beaumont, W., Blaylock, N., Ferguson, G., Galescu, L., and Swift, M. (2009) Going beyond PBD: A Play-by-Play and Mixed-initiative Approach. Proceedings of the CHI Workshop on End User Programming for the Web, Boston, MA, April. [PDF]

2008

2007

Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. (2007). Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Systems for Collaborative Problem-Solving. AI Magazine 28(2):23-32, Special Issue on Mixed-Initiative Assistants. AAAI Press. [PDF]

Allen, J., Chambers, N., Ferguson, G., Galescu, L., Jung, H., Swift, M., and Taysom, W. (2007). PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07): 1514-1519. Vancouver, Canada, Jul 22-26. Outstanding paper award winner. [pdf]

2006

Allen, J., Ferguson, G., Blaylock N., Byron, D., Chambers, N., Dzikovska, M., Galescu, L., and Swift, M. (2006). Chester: Towards a Personal Medication Advisor. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39(5):500-513. Elsevier. [PDF]

2005

Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. (2005). Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Systems for Collaborative Problem-Solving. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Mixed-Initiative Problem Solving Assistants (FS-05-07), Washington, DC, Nov 4 - 6, 57-62. [PDF]
Brown, C. M., Ferguson, G., Barnum, P., Hu, B., and Costello, D. (2005). Quagents: A Game Platform for Intelligent Agents. Proceedings of the First Artificial Intelligence and Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-2005), Marina del Rey, CA, May 31 - June 2, 9-14. [PDF]

2004

Brown, C.M., Barnum, P., Costello, D., Ferguson, G., Hu, B., and Van Wie, M. (2004). Quake II as a Robotic and Multi-Agent Platform. Technical Report 853, University of Rochester Computer Science Department, October. [PDF]

2003

Blaylock, N., Allen, J., and Ferguson, G. (2003). Managing communicative intentions with collaborative problem solving. In Ronnie Smith and Jan van Kuppevelt, editors, Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue, Kluwer Series on Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 22, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 63-84. [PDF]

2002

Allen, J. and Ferguson, G. (2002) Human-Machine Collaborative Planning. Proceedings of the Third International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space, Houston, TX, October 27-29. [PDF]
Allen, J., Blaylock, N., and Ferguson, G. (2002). A Problem Solving Model for Collaborative Agents. Proceedings of the Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-02), Bologna, Italy, July 31-August 2, 774-781. [PDF]
Ferguson, G., Allen, J., Blaylock, N., Byron, D., Chambers, N., Dzikovska, M., Galescu, L., Shen, X., Swier, R., and Swift, M. (2002). The Medication Advisor Project: Preliminary Report, Technical Report 776, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Rochester, May. [PDF]

2001

James Allen, Donna Byron, Myroslava Dzikovska, George Ferguson, Lucian Galescu, and Amanda Stent, "Towards Conversational Human-Computer Interaction," AI Magazine 22(4), pages 27-38, Winter, 2001. [PDF]
James Allen, George Ferguson, and Amanda Stent, "An architecture for more realistic conversational systems," in Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2001 (IUI-01), pages 1-8, Santa Fe, NM, January 14-17, 2001. [PDF]

2000

James Allen, George Ferguson, Bradford W. Miller, Eric K. Ringger, and Teresa Sikorski Zollo, "Dialogue Systems: From Theory to Practice in TRAINS-96," in Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Robert Dale, Hermann Moisl, and Harold Somers, editors. Marcel Dekker, New York. 2000. Pp. 347-376.
James Allen, Donna Byron, Myroslava Dzikovska, George Ferguson, Lucian Galescu, and Amanda Stent, "An Architecture for a Generic Dialogue Shell," Journal of Natural Language Engineering, special issue on Best Practices in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering, 6(3), December, 2000, pp. 1-16. [PDF]
Mark Burstein, George Ferguson, and James Allen, Integrating Agent-Based Mixed-Initiative Control with an Existing Multi-Agent Planning System, Technical Report 729, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, May 2000. [PDF]
Mark Burstein, George Ferguson, and James Allen, Integrating Agent-Based Mixed-Initiative Control with an Existing Multi-Agent Planning System, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-2000), Boston, MA, 389-390.

1999

1998

George Ferguson and James Allen, "TRIPS: An Intelligent Integrated Problem-Solving Assistant," in Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98), Madison, WI, 26-30 July 1998, pp. 567-573. [PDF]

1997

James F. Allen and George Ferguson, ``Actions and Events in Interval Temporal Logic,'' in Oliveiro Stock (ed.), Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 205--245.

1996

David Traum, Lenhart K. Schubert, Massimo Poesio, Nat Martin, Marc Light, Chung Hee Hwang, Peter Heeman, George Ferguson, and James F. Allen, ``Knowledge representation in the TRAINS-93 conversation system,'' Intl. Journal of Expert Systems, 9(1), Special Issue on Knowledge Representation and Inference for Natural Language Processing, 1996, pp. 173--223.
George M. Ferguson, James F. Allen, Brad W. Miller and Eric K. Ringger, The Design and Implementation of the TRAINS-96 System: A Prototype Mixed-Initiative Planning Assistant, TRAINS Technical Note 96-5, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, October 1996. [Postscript]
David Traum, Lenhart Schubert, Massimo Poesio, Nathaniel Martin, Marc Light, Chung Hee Hwang, Peter Heeman, George Ferguson, and James Allen, Knowledge Representation in the TRAINS-93 Conversation System, TRAINS Technical Note 96-4 and Technical Report 633, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, August 1996. [Postscript]
George Ferguson, James Allen, and Brad Miller, "TRAINS-95: Towards a Mixed-Initiative Planning Assistant," in Proceedings of the Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems (AIPS-96), Edinburgh, Scotland, 29-31 May 1996, pp. 70-77. [PDF]
James F. Allen, George Ferguson, and Lenhart K. Schubert, ``Planning in Complex Worlds via Mixed-Initiative Interaction,'' Advanced Planning Technology: Technological Achievements of the ARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative, AAAI Press, 1996, pp. 53--60.

1995

James F. Allen, George Ferguson, Brad Miller, and Eric Ringger, "TRAINS as an Embodied Natural Language Dialog System," in Embodied Language and Action: Papers from the 1995 Fall Symposium, AAAI Technical Report FS-95-05.
George Ferguson, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Mixed-Initiative Planning, Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, February, 1995. Available as URCS TR 562, January, 1995. [PDF]
James F. Allen, George Ferguson, Bradford W. Miller, and Eric K. Ringger, "Spoken Dialogue and Interactive Planning," in Proceedings of the 1995 ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology (SLST) Workshop, Austin, Texas, January 1995.
James F. Allen, Lenhart K. Schubert, George Ferguson, Peter Heeman, Chung Hee Hwang, Tsuneaki Kato, Marc Light, Nathaniel G. Martin, Bradford W. Miller, Massimo Poesio, and David R. Traum, "The TRAINS Project: A case study in building a conversational planning agent," Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, 7(1995), 7-48. Also available as TRAINS Technical Note 94-3 and Technical Report 532, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, September 1994. [Postscript]

1994

Massimo Poesio, George Ferguson, Peter Heeman, Chung Hee Hwang, David R. Traum, James F. Allen, Nathaniel Martin, and Lenhart K. Schubert, "Knowledge Representation in the TRAINS System," in Proceedings of the AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium on Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems, New Orleans, LA, November 1994. [PDF]
James Allen, Lenhart Schubert, George Ferguson, Peter Heeman, Chung Hee Hwang, Tsuneaki Kato, Marc Light, Nathaniel Martin, Bradford Miller, Massimo Poesio, David Traum, The TRAINS Project: A Case Study in Defining a Conversational Planning Agent, TRAINS Technical Note 94-3 and Technical Report 532, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, September 1994. [Postscript]
George Ferguson and James F. Allen, "Arguing About Plans: Plan Representation and Reasoning for Mixed-Initiative Planning," Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems (AIPS-94), Chicago, IL, 13-15 July, 1994, pp. 43-48. [PDF]
James F. Allen and George Ferguson, "Events and Actions in Interval Temporal Logic," Journal of Logic and Computation 4(5):531-579, Special Issue on Actions and Processes, October, 1994. Also available as URCS Technical Report 521, July 1994. [Postscript]
David R. Traum, James F. Allen, George Ferguson, Peter A. Heeman, Chung Hee Hwang, Tsuneaki Kato, Nathaniel Martin, Massimo Poesio, and Lenhart K. Schubert, "Integrating Natural Language Understanding and Plan Reasoning in the TRAINS-93 Conversation System," in Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Active NLP, 21-23 March, 1994. [PDF]

1993

George Ferguson and James F. Allen, `` Cooperative Plan Reasoning for Dialogue Systems (Position Paper),'' AAAI Fall Symposium on Human-Computer Collaboration, Raleigh NC, 22-24 October 1993.
George Ferguson and James F. Allen, `` Generic Plan Recognition for Dialogue Systems,'' ARPA Workshop on Human Language Technology, Princeton, NJ, 21-23 March, 1993.

1992

George M. Ferguson, Explicit Representation of Events, Actions and Plans for Assumption-Based Plan Reasoning, Technical Report 428, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, June 1992. [Postscript]
George Ferguson, Domain Plan Reasoning in TRAINS-90, TRAINS Technical Note 91-2, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, June 1992.

1989

George M. Ferguson, Identity and Skolem Functions in Resolution-Based Hypothetical Reasoning, M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Spring, 1989. [PDF]

Last change: 15 Dec 2015