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Research

My research spans human-computer interaction (HCI) + machine learning (ML) + mobility, and their intersections. My aspiration is to conduct research and development that impacts millions of real users. Recently, I've focused on mobile input and interaction, and was directly involved in shipping the soft keyboard for Windows Phone 7, auto-completion for Bing Mobile and the mobile speech product, Voice Command 1.6.

I have an inter-disciplinary educational background, with a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago.

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Professional

I am currently serving as the President of (SIGDIAL) Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, and as a Managing Editor for the online journal Dialogue and Discourse. I am also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of New Hampshire. Professional activities for 2010-11:

• Industrial Case Studies Co-Chair, MobileHCI 2011
• Technical Co-Chair, 2010 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology
• Co-Organizer, 5th Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments
• Co-Organizer, 2nd International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces for Developing Regions
• Program Committee, ACL 2010, ACL 2010 Workshop on Companionable Dialogue Systems, Intelligent Environments 2010, Interspeech 2010, SIGDIAL 2010,Young Researchers Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems 2010 & 2010 Intl Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems

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Publications

Refereed Conference, Workshop & Symposium Papers

• A. Kumar, T. Paek & B. Lee. Voice typing: A new speech interaction model for dictation on touchscreen devices. Proceedings of CHI, 2012, pp. 2277-2286.
• T. Paek & P. Hsu. Sampling representative phrase sets for text entry experiments: A procedure and public resource. Proceedings of CHI, 2011. Honorary Mention Award. Code and stimuli.
• D. Rudchenko, T. Paek & E. Badger. Text Text Revolution: A game that improves text entry on mobile touchscreen keyboards. Proceedings of PERVASIVE, 2011. Windows Phone 7 game download.
• T. Paek, K. Chang, I. Almog, E. Badger & T. Sengupta. A practical examination of multimodal feedback and guidance signals for mobile touchscreen keyboards. Proceedings of MobileHCI, 2010, pp. 365-368. Longer technical report
• A. Gunawardana, T. Paek & C. Meek. Usability guided key-target resizing for soft keyboards. Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2010, pp. 111-118.
• T. Paek, M. Gamon, S. Counts, D. Chickering & A. Dhesi. Predicting the importance of newsfeed posts and social network friends. Proceedings of 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2010.
• Y. Ju & T. Paek. Using speech to reply to SMS messages while driving: An in-car simulator user study. Proceedings of ACL, 2010, pp. 313-317.
• T. Paek, B. Thiesson, Y. Ju & B. Lee. Designing Phrase Builder: A mobile real-time query expansion interface. Proceedings of MobileHCI, 2009, pp. 1- 10. Demo (3MB)
• Y. Ju & T. Paek. A voice search approach to replying to SMS messages in automobiles. Proceedings of Interspeech, 2009, pp. 987-990.
• A. Kun, T. Paek, Z. Medenica, N. Memarovic & O. Palinko. Glancing at personal navigation devices can affect driving: Experimental results and design implications. Proceedings of Automotive UI, 2009, pp. 129-136.
• G. Shani, C. Meek, T. Paek, B. Thiesson & G. Venolia. Searching large indexes on tiny devices: Optimizing binary search with character pinning. Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2009, pp. 257-266.
• T. Paek, B. Thiesson, Y. Ju & B. Lee. Search Vox: Leveraging multimodal refinement and partial knowledge for mobile voice search. Proceedings of User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2008, pp. 141-150. Demo (2MB)
  • Presentation given at Voice Search 2009.
• T. Paek & Y. Ju. Accommodating explicit user expressions of uncertainty in voice search or something like that. Proceedings of Interspeech, 2008.
• T. Paek, S. Gandhe & D. Chickering Rapidly deploying grammar-based speech applications with active learning and back-off grammars . Proceedings of the 9th SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, 2008.
• T. Paek, Y. Ju & C. Meek. People Watcher: A game for eliciting human-transcribed data for automated directory assistance. Proceedings of Interspeech, 2007. ELRA Best Paper Award.
• A. Kun, T. Paek & Z. Medenica. The effect of speech interface accuracy on driving performance. Proceedings of Interspeech, 2007.
• J. Sherwani, D. Yu, T. Paek, M. Czerwinski & A. Acero. VoicePedia: Towards speech-based access to unstructured information. Proceedings of Interspeech, 2007.
• T. Paek, S. Gandhe, D. Chickering & Y. Ju. Handling out-of-grammar commands in mobile speech interaction using backoff filler models. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Grammar-Based Approaches to Spoken Language Processing (SPEECHGRAM), 2007, pp. 33-40.
• T. Paek. Toward evaluation that leads to best practices: Reconciling dialogue evaluation in research and industry. Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies, 2007, pp. 40-47.
• T. Paek & D. Chickering. The Markov assumption in spoken dialogue management. Proceedings of the 6th SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, 2005, pp. 35-44.
• T. Paek & R. Chandrasekar. Windows as a second language: An overview of the jargon project. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Augmented Cognition, 2005.
• T. Paek & E. Horvitz. Optimizing automated call routing by integrating spoken dialog models with queuing models. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL, 2004, pp. 41-48.
• T. Paek, S. Dumais & R. Logan. WaveLens: A new view onto internet search results. Proceedings of Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), 2004, pp. 727-734.
• T. Paek, M. Agrawala, S. Basu, S. Drucker, T. Kristjansson, R. Logan, K. Toyama & A. Wilson. Toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays. Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2004, pp. 266-269.
• T. Paek. Toward a taxonomy of communication errors. ISCA Workshop on Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems, 2003, pp. 53-58.
• T. Paek & E. Horvitz. On the utility of decision-theoretic hidden subdialog. ISCA Workshop on Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems, 2003, pp. 95-100.
• T. Paek. Empirical methods for evaluating dialog systems. ACL 2001 Workshop on Evaluation Methodologies for Language and Dialogue Systems, 2001, pp. 3-10.
• E. Horvitz & T. Paek. Harnessing models of users' goals to mediate clarification dialog in spoken language systems. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on User Modeling (UM), 2001, pp. 3-13.
• T. Paek & E. Horvitz. Conversation as action under uncertainty. Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2000, pp. 455-464. Demo (32MB)
• T. Paek, E. Horvitz & E. Ringger. Continuous listening for unconstrained spoken dialog. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), 2000.
• E. Horvitz & T. Paek. DeepListener: Harnessing expected utility to guide clarification dialog in spoken language systems. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), 2000.
• T. Paek & E. Horvitz. Uncertainty, utility, and misunderstanding: A decision-theoretic perspective on grounding in conversational systems. AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of Communication in Collaborative Systems, 1999.
• E. Horvitz & T. Paek. A computational architecture for conversation. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on User Modeling (UM), 1999, pp. 201-210.

Journal Papers

• T. Paek & R. Pieraccini. Automating spoken dialogue management design using machine learning: An industry perspective. Speech Communication, Special Issue on Evaluating New Methods and Models for Advanced Speech-Based Interactive Systems , 2008, 50(8-9): 716-729.
• T. Paek & D. Chickering. Improving command and control speech recognition on mobile devices: Using predictive user models for language modeling. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Statistical and Probabilistic Methods for User Modeling, 2007, 17(1-2): 93-117.
• D. Chickering & T. Paek. Personalizing influence diagrams: Applying online learning strategies to dialogue management. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Statistical and Probabilistic Methods for User Modeling, 2007, 17(1-2): 71-91.
• E. Horvitz & T. Paek. Complementary computing: Policies for transferring callers from dialog systems to human receptionists. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Statistical and Probabilistic Methods for User Modeling, 2007, 17(1-2): 159-182.
• T. Paek & D. Chickering. Evaluating the Markov assumption in Markov decision processes for spoken dialogue management. Language Resources and Evaluation, Special Issue on Data Resources, Evaluation and Dialogue Interaction, 2006, 40(1): 47-66.
• E. Horvitz, C. Kadie, T. Paek, D. Hovel. Models of attention in computing and communication: From principles to applications. Communications of the ACM, 2003, 46(3): 52-59.

Miscellaneous

• T. Paek. Introduction to Dialogue Management and Evaluation. Lecture for the Johns Hopkins University Summer School on Human Language Technology, July 10. 2007.
• T. Paek. Reinforcement learning for spoken dialogue systems: Comparing strengths and weaknesses for practical deployment. Interspeech-06 Workshop on "Dialogue on Dialogues - Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interacive Systems", 2006.
• T. Paek & E. Horvitz. Grounding criterion: Toward a formal theory of grounding. Microsoft Technical Report, MSR-TR-2000-40, April 2000.

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Last updated: December, 2010

E-mail: timpaek at microsoft dot com
Directions: Microsoft Research
U.S.Mail: One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA, 98052-6399, USA
Tel: 425.703.8647
Fax: 425.706.7329 (This is the main MS FAX number so please use "Attention: Tim Paek")