Christopher A. Pennington

AgoraNet, Inc.
102 East Main Street, Suite 303, Newark, DE 19711
(302) 224-2475 / 224-2552 (FAX); penningt@agora-net.com

Research Interests

Intelligent multimedia tutoring systems, natural language understanding / generation, augmentative communication, human-computer interaction.

Education

M.S., Computer and Information Sciences, 1990	University of Delaware, Newark, DE	GPA: 4.0
B.A., Computer Science / Mathematics, 1988	Messiah College, Grantham, PA	GPA: 4.0

Professional Experience

MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPER / VICE PRESIDENT	AgoraNet, Inc.
March 1999 - present	Newark, DE

Current software project responsibilities include co-managing a research project that is developing an intelligent multimedia tutoring for deaf students learning written English; enhancing a Macromedia Director multimedia presentation shell to collect and analyze experimental data on animation and verb recognition; and helping design a prototype mobile graphics communication system for people with cognitive disabilities. Also helped design and develop a multimedia interactive speech training system involving data collection and inter-application communication with analysis/synthesis programs. Other previous activities consisted of participating in the design of a web-based interactive medical education site; modifications to evoked potential research software in C++; and creation of a Director-based interface for an industrial contractor's CD-ROM marketing tool.

 

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE	Center for Applied Science and Engineering, University of Delaware
March 1997 - February 1999	A. I. duPont Hospital for Children, Wilmington, DE

Managed the day-to-day activities of the Natural Language Interfaces group and co-supervised the research and technology transfer of projects that applied natural language processing to improve augmentative communication.

RESEARCH ENGINEER	Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, University of Delaware
July 1993 - March 1997	A. I. duPont Hospital for Children, Wilmington, DE

Involved in developing research prototypes of natural language processing approaches to augmentative communication. Implemented a multimedia presentation shell used to collect and analyze experimental data on animation. Also worked on the design of an object-oriented software architecture for augmentative communication devices.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT	Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, University of Delaware
Fall 1988 - June 1993	A. I. duPont Institute, Wilmington, DE

Worked on research and development of the Compansion project, a system that applies artificial intelligence techniques to enhance the rate of augmentative communication devices used by people with severe disabilities.

Honors / Awards

Best Paper co-author: Fifth International Conference on User Modeling (1996)
University of Delaware Competitive Fellowship (1992-93)
member of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
graduated summa cum laude (1988)
Messiah College Founder's Scholarship (1984-88)
National Merit Scholarship (1984)

Selected Publications

Michaud, L. N., McCoy, K. F., & Pennington, C.A. (2000). An intelligent tutoring system for deaf learners of written English. In Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies (ASSETS 2000), November 13-15, 2000.

McCoy, K. F., Pennington, C. A., & Badman, A. L. (1998) Compansion: From research prototype to practical integration. Natural Language Engineering Journal, 4(1): 73-95.

Pennington, C. A., & McCoy, K. F. (1998). Providing intelligent language feedback for augmentative communication users. In V. O. Mittal et al. (Eds.), Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence: Applications in Robotics, User Interfaces and Artificial Intelligence, (pp. 59-72). Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg.

Pennington, C. A., McCoy, K. F., Bedrosian, J., & Hoag, L. (1998). Important issues for effectively using prestored text in augmentative communication. In AAAI-98 Workshop on Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technology, Madison, Wisconsin, July.

Vanderheyden, P. B., & Pennington, C. A. (1998). An augmentative communication interface based on conversational schemata. In V. O. Mittal et al. (Eds.), Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence: Applications in Robotics, User Interfaces and Artificial Intelligence, (pp. 109-125). Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg.

Carpenter, Jr., T. L., McCoy, K. F., & Pennington, C. A. (1997). Schema-based organization of reusable text in AAC: User-interface considerations. In Proceedings of RESNA '97 20th Annual Conference. Pittsburgh, PA, June 1997.

McCoy, K. F., Demasco, P., Pennington, C. A., Badman, A. L. (1997). Some interface issues in developing intelligent communication aids for people with disabilities. In Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Orlando, FL, January 1997.

McCoy, K. F., Demasco, P., Gray, J., Pennington, C. A., Cedilnik, M., Badman, A. L., & Kushler, C. (1996). The intelligent parser generator: An intelligent language aid for people with cognitive impairments, In Proceedings of the 1996 AAAI Fall Symposium on Developing Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities (pp. 70-77). MIT, Cambridge, MA, November, 1996.

McCoy, K. F., Pennington, C. A., & Suri. L. Z. (1996). Considering the effects of second language learning on generation. In Proceedings of the 8th International Natural Language Generation Workshop. Sussex, UK, June 1996.

McCoy, K. F., Pennington, C. A., & Suri, L. Z. (1996). English error correction: A syntactic user model based on principled ‘mal-rule’ scoring. In Proceedings of UM-96, the Fifth International Conference on User Modeling (pp. 59-66). Kailua-Kona, HI.

McCoy, K. F., McKnitt, W. M., Peischl, D. M., Pennington, C. A., Vanderheyden, P. B., & Demasco, P. W. (1994). AAC-user therapist interactions: Preliminary linguistic observations and implications for compansion. In M. Binion (Ed.), Proceedings of the RESNA '94 Annual Conference (pp. 129-131). Arlington, VA: RESNA Press.

McCoy, K. F., Demasco, P. W., Jones, M. A., Pennington, C. A., Vanderheyden, P. B., & Zickus, W. M. (1994). A communication tool for people with disabilities: Lexical semantics for filling in the pieces. In Proceedings of ASSETS ‘94, the First Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (pp. 107-114). New York: ACM.

Jones, M., Demasco, P., McCoy, K., & Pennington, C. (1991). Knowledge representation considerations for a domain independent semantic parser. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual RESNA Conference (pp. 109-111). Washington, D.C: RESNA Press.

McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Jones, M., Pennington, C., & Rowe, C. (1990). Applying natural language processing techniques to augmentative communication systems. In H. Karlgren (Ed.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 413-415). Morristown, NJ: Association of Computational Linguistics.

McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Gong, Y., Pennington, C., & Rowe, C. (1989). A semantic parser for understanding ill-formed input. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual RESNA Conference (pp. 35-37). Washington, D.C: RESNA Press.