Michael Witbrock, Vice President of Research

Michael has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and currently is Vice President for Research at Cycorp. Before joining Cycorp, in 2001, to direct its knowledge formation and dialogue processing efforts, he had been Principal Scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge based approaches to understanding web user behavior, a research scientist at Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center, working on statistical summarization, and a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon on the Informedia spoken document information retrieval project. He also performed dissertation work in the area of speaker modeling.

He is author of numerous publications in areas ranging across neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition. A few relevant publications include:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Witbrock, M.J., and Mittal, V.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.