George M. Ferguson

• Highly rated teaching of large introductory and advanced Computer Science courses
• UR Students’ Association 2018-2019 Professor of the Year in Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Curricular development and planning for a rapidly growing program
• Data analytics and process development to support the Department's teaching mission
• Liaison with students, other departments and programs, and University administration
• URCS homepage

• Responsible for operations, programming, and curricular development in new (2013) three-story, 18,900-square-foot building
• Machine shop, Fab studio, high-end computing and graphics, 3D printing, audio and video production studios
• Responsible for building and maintaining a Maker community and fostering inter-disciplinary innovation across all areas of the center

• Defined the fields of mixed-initiative systems and conversational assistants that combine natural human-computer interaction with intelligent decision support; 50+ research publications
• Primary architect and developer of prototype collaborative assistant systems for logistics, crisis management, personal healthcare, and task learning, among other applications
• Proposed, received, and managed projects from agencies including DARPA, ONR, NSF, NIH, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation totaling more than $10M for our group
• Taught introductory programming, web development, and artificial intelligence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; supervised project groups and student teams
• Founding member of the Center for Future Health at the UR Medical Center whose mission was to develop interdisciplinary technologies to keep people healthy in their homes (1999-2009)

• UR Students’ Association 2018-2019 Professor of the Year in Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Outstanding Paper, Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2007)
• Program co-Chair, Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2004)
• Invited participant, CCC-NSF-NIH Symposium on Computing and Health: New Opportunities and Directions, 2012
• Program Committee, AAAI Spring Symposium on AI and Health Communication, 2011
• Organizer, “Daily Medicine: A panel exploring the changing paradigms of chronic illness,” MedTech-2008
• Organizer, AAAI 2007 Spring Symposium on Intentions in Intelligent Systems
• Invited participant, Robert Wood Johnson Synergy Workshop on Technology for Self-Care and Self-Monitoring, 2005
• Program Committees: AAAI, IJCAI, KCAP, UIST, IUI, PRICAI, ...
• Panelist/Reviewer: National Science Foundation (NSF), academic and SBIR programs

Full academic CV: http://www.georgeferguson.com/george/cv

• Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. (2011). A Cognitive Model for Collaborative Agents. Proceedings of the AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems, AAAI Press Technical Report FS-11-01.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. Outstanding paper award winner.
• 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, Special Issue on Dialog Systems for Health Communication, 39(5): 500-513.
• Allen, J., G. Ferguson, and A. Stent (2001). An Architecture for More Realistic Conversational Systems. Proceedings of the Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-01): 1–8.

Full list of academic publications: http://www.georgeferguson.com/george/papers

• USA Hockey Level 4 coaching certification; many years coaching youth hockey
• IT department for my children’s school (in a past life)
• Music, cooking, hiking