Biosketch
Heather Pon-Barry is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in spoken language processing, dialogue, and human-robot interaction. At Mount Holyoke, she directs the Interactive Computing Research Lab where she and students are enabling educational robots and service robots to engage human users in conversational dialogue. Her work develops models for physically-situated conversational dialogue, to allow social robots to move beyond just the words a person says and incorporate other signals, including the intonation patterns of speech and visual information. She also works on activities to broaden participation in computer science, including the development of MaGE (Megas and Gigas Educate), a peer mentorship program with a novel curriculum that prepares undergraduate students to provide effective feedback on computing assignments and contribute to an inclusive learning environment. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Google CS Capacity Award. She holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University.
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