MICHAEL L. MAULDIN

ADDRESS

PO Box 2099
Mabank, TX 75147
fuzzy@lazytoad.com

CURRENT POSITIONS

• Severely Retired, Mabank, Texas, since 2006.
• Owner, Lazy Toad Tanch, Mabank, Texas, since 2021.

PREVIOUS POSITIONS

• Inventor, co-founder and chief scientist, Lycos, Inc., Boston, 1995-98.
• Adjunct Research Computer Scientist, Language Technology Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 1995-2022.
• Co-founder of Virtual Personalities, LLC, 1997. Company changed names to Conversive, Inc., board member until 2013.
• Vice President, Robot Club & Grille, Pittsburgh, PA, 2002-03.
• Software Engineer, Texas Instruments, Houston, 1979-81.
• Student Engineer, Ortloff Corporation, Midland, Texas, 1977-79.

EDUCATION

• PhD in Computer Science, August 1989, Carnegie Mellon University (thesis advisor: Jaime Carbonell).
• MS in Computer Science, May 1983, Carnegie Mellon University.
• BA cum laude, double major in Mathematical and Computer Sciences, 1981, Rice University.
• Valedictorian, 1977, Midland High School, Midland, Texas.

APPOINTMENTS

• Carnegie Mellon University, research computer scientist, Center for Machine Translation, 1991-95, research associate, 1989-91. Courses taught: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Fall 1992, Fall 1994.

ROBOT COMPETITIONS

• I was a veteran competitor on Comedy Central's BattleBots combat robot sports program from 2000 until 2002. My robots FrostBite and IceBerg reached the quarter-finals three times.

• From 2002 until 2003, my wife and I ran a combination restaurant and robot combat arena in North Huntingdon, PA at the Robot Club & Grille.

• My robot Icecube was the 2006 Robot Fighting League National Champion middleweight.

• Competed in the International Robogames and the Combots Cup in San Mateo, CA. The most recent Robogames was televised by the Discovery Science Channel on May 20th, 2011 as ``Killer Robots: Robogames 2011''.
• Competed in Discovery Channel's Battlebots in 2018 and 2019 with heavyweight robots Hypothermia and Texas Twister.

RESEARCH PROJECTS

• Information Retrieval: I was a principal investigator in the Informedia project, in charge of the natural language, indexing and retrieval portions of the project. We used the PURSUIT retrieval engine to provide full content retrieval from a digital video library, focusing on approximate matching including spelling correction and matching on phonetic similarity. This work was funded by grants from the the National Science Foundation (in cooperation with NASA and ARPA), the Heinz Foundation, and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

  A recent offshoot of the work on video retrieval and earlier work on the Tipster project is research into indexing the World Wide Web with the Lycos/Pursuit system. Lycos provides probabilistic retrieval of abstracts automatically collected from the World Wide Web.

  The indexing work builds on CMU's participation in ARPA's TIPSTER Data Extraction project (in partnership with General Electric's Corporate Research and Development division). The joint GE-CMU Shogun data extraction system had the highest overall score of any group in ARPA's MUC-5 message understanding conference, and CMU's Textract system (built in cooperation with Nippon Telephone and Telegraph's Data division) scored the highest combined recall-precision score of any system evaluated by ARPA at MUC-5.

• Turing Test: I am also interested in natural language processing systems that attempt to pass the Turing test. I have been working for 5 years on JULIA conversation program, which converses daily with other people on the INTERNET using TINYMUDs, and which placed third in the 1991, 1992 and 1993 annual Loebner Prize Competitions held in Boston and San Diego.

RESEARCH GRANTS

• ``Informedia: Integrated Speech, Image and Language Understanding for Creation and Exploration of Digital Video Libraries,'' Principal Investigator along with Takeo Kanade, Raj Reddy, Marvin Sirbu, Scott Stevens, Doug Tygar, and Howard Wactlar. Grant was $4,800,000 from 9/94 to 8/98.

• ``MuseUM: Multi-User Shared Environments for Use in Manufacturing,'' Principal Investigator. Grant from National Institute of Standards (NIST) under BAA-52SBNB4C8231. Grant was $24,651 from 10/94 through 6/95.

• ``Research in the Electronic Library using Computer Science Technical Reports,'' William Arms (PI). Contract funded by ARPA and overseen by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) for $1,424,320 from 10/92 through 6/95.

• ``TIPSTER: Data Extraction,'' Co-Principal Investigator with J.G. Carbonell (PI) and T. Mitamura (Co-PI). Subcontract to General Electric Research and Development Center Proposal in response to DARPA BAA No. 90-16. The CMU subcontract was for $814,000 from 9/91 through 8/93.

HONORS

• Elected to Sigma Xi (science honor society), 1984
• N.L. Industries Foundation Fellowship, 1982-83
• Roy Merit Scholarship, 1980-81
• Cohn Merit Scholar, 1977-81
• National Merit Scholar, 1977-81

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

• Reviewer for Prentice Hall, ACM, and IEEE Expert Magazine, 1991-94
• External reviewer for Tipster Architecture Working Group (ORD), 1994.

INVITED TALKS

• ``Roadmap to the Turing Test,'' IBM Yorktown Heights, 2001, New York.
• Autonomous Agents, 1999, in Seattle. Washington.
• Experimental Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1997, in Providence, Rhode Island.
• American Society for Information Science, 1994, 57th annual meeting in Alexandria, VA.
• American Society for Information Science, 1992, 55th annual meeting in Pittsburgh
• Center for Information and Language Studies, University of Chicago, 1990.
• Carnegie Group, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, October, 1989.
• University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, April 1989.
• Microelectronics Computer Consortium, Austin, TX, April 1989.
• Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, March 1989.
• Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ, January 1989.

CONSULTANCIES

• Westinghouse Science and Technology Center (formerly called Research and Development), consultant and lecturer in artificial intelligence, 1983-1995.
• Integrated Equities, Pittsburgh, PA, May, 1988.
• Information Technology Institutes, Matawan, NJ, August 1985.
• Carnegie Group, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA. Lectured in CGI Natural Language Course, March and June, 1985.
• Keithley Instruments, Cleveland, OH, March, 1985.

Patents

• 30-Nov-2004 US 6,826,540 Virtual Personalities
  "Virtual human interface for conducting surveys"

• 10-Jun-2003 US 6,578,048 The other Lycos spider patent
  "Method for searching a queued and ranked constructed catalog of files stored on a network"

• 10-Nov-1998 US 5,748,954 The Lycos spider patent
  "Method for searching a queued and ranked constructed catalog of files stored on a network"

• 5-May-1998 US 5,835,667 The Informedia digital library patent
  "Method and apparatus for creating a searchable digital video library and a system and method of using such a library"

• 2-Sep-1997 US 5,664,227 Informedia audio/video skimming patent
  "System and method for skimming digital audio/video data"

PERSONAL INFORMATION

• US citizen, born 3/23/59, Dallas, Texas.
• Married to Deborah Mauldin since February 23, 2000.
• Private pilot, single engine land, with taildragger endorsement.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Conceptual Information Retrieval: A Case Study in Adaptive Partial Parsing, Kluwer Academic Press, September 1991.

• Information Retrieval by Text Skimming, PhD Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University. August, 1989 (also available as CMU Computer Science technical report CMU-CS-89-193).

Book Chapters

• ``Going Under Cover: Passing as Human; Artificial Interest: A Step on the Road to AI,'' Chapter 24 of Parsing the Turing Test, R. Epstein et al. editors, Springer Science and Business Media, BV, 2008.

• M. Shaw, editor, The Carnegie Mellon Curriculum for Undergraduate Computer Science, with S.D. Brookes, M. Donner, J. Driscoll, R. Pausch, W.L. Scherlis, M. Shaw, and A.Z. Spector. Springer-Verlag, 1985 (also CMU Computer Science technical reports CMU-CS-83-156/7).

Invited Papers

• ``Beyond the Keyword Barrier: Knowledge-Based Information Retrieval,'' with J.G. Carbonell and R.H. Thomason, Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS-87), North-Holland Press, Amsterdam, March 1987.

• ``Text Generation for Expert Systems Interfaces,'' 1984 Conference on Intelligent Systems and Machines (ISM-84), Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, April 1984.

Refereed Papers

• ``Technical Challenges for the Informedia Digital Video Library.'' Wactlar, H., Christel, M., Stevens, S., Kanade, T., Mauldin, M., Reddy, R., Smith, M., Proceedings of International Symposium on Digital Libraries (ISDL '95), Japan, August 23-25, 1995.

• ``Informedia Digital Video Library.'' Christel, M., Kanade, T., Mauldin, M., Reddy, R., Sirbu, M., Stevens, S., Wactlar, H., Communications of the ACM, 38(4), pp. 57-58, 1995.

• ``Chatterbots, Tinymuds and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition,'' the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), August 1994.

• ``Web Agent Related Research at the Center for Machine Translation,'' With J.R.R. Leavitt, ACM Special Interest Group on Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (ACM-SIGNIDR-V), McLean, VA, August 1994.

• ``Retrieval Performance in FERRET: A Conceptual Information Retrieval System,'' Proceedings of the 14 International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Chicago, October, 1991.

• ``An Expert Critiquer for Propulsion Gear Design: A Case Study in Intelligent Decision Support,'' with E. K. McKinley, and E. M. Roth, Proceedings of the 1989 Conference of the Human Factors Society, October 1989.

• ``Retrieving Information with a Text Skimming Parser,'' Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL-86), October 1986. Summary of ``Thesis Proposal: Information Retrieval by Text Skimming,'' presented 29 May 1986 (unpublished).

• ``Toward Joint Person-Machine Cognitive Systems: A Prototype Expert System for Electronics Troubleshooting,'' with E. Roth, G.S. Elias, and W. Ramage, Proceedings of the 1985 Conference of the Human Factors Society, October 1985.

• ``Maintaining Diversity in Genetic Search,'' Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-84), August 1984.

• ``Semantic Rule Based Text Generation,'' Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-84), July 1984.

• ``Rog-O-Matic: A Belligerent Expert System,'' with G. Jacobson, A.W. Appel, and L.G. Hamey, Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI-84), May 1984 (also CMU Computer Science technical report CMU-CS-83-144). Described by K. Dewdney in Scientific American, vol. 252 no. 2 pp. 18-21, February 1985.

• ``The XCALIBUR Project, A Natural Language Interface to Expert Systems,'' with J.G. Carbonell, W.M. Boggs, and P.G. Anick, Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-83), August 1983. Reprinted as ``The XCALIBUR Project, A Natural Language Interface to Expert Systems and Data Bases,'' in S. Andriole, editor, Applications in Artificial Intelligence, Petrocelli Books, Inc., 1983 (also CMU Computer Science technical report CMU-CS-83-143).

Non-refereed Papers

• ``Techniques for the Creation and Exploration of Digital Video Libraries''. Christel, M., Kanade, T., Mauldin, M., Reddy, R., Stevens, S., Wactlar, H., Multimedia Tools and Applications (Volume 2), Borko Furht, editor. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.

• ``Informedia: Integrated Sppech, Image, and Language Understanding for Creation and Exploration of Digital Video Libraries,'' American Society for Information Science, 58th annual meeting, Chicago, IL, October 1995.

• ``Description of the TIPSTER/SHOGUN System as used for MUC-5,'' P. Jacobs, editor, Proceedings of the Fifth Message Understanding Conference, sponsored by ARPA, Baltimore, Maryland, August 1993.

• ``Description of the TIPSTER/SHOGUN System as used for MUC-4,'' with P. Jacobs, G. Krupka, L. Rau and T. Kaufmann, Proceedings of the Fourth Message Understanding Conference, sponsored by DARPA/SISTO, McLean, Virginia, June 1992.

• ``Better Information Retrieval Through Linguistic Sophistication,'' Machine Learning Workshop III (MLW-III), June 1985. Reprinted in T.M. Mitchell, J.G. Carbonell and R.S. Michalski, editors, Machine Learning: A Guide to Current Research, Kluwer Press, Boston, 1986, pp. 189-192.

CD ROM Software

• James D. Murray and William vanRyper, Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats, O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, CA. July, 1994. Version 1.2 of the FBM image processing package is included on the CD ROM that accompanies the book.