Semantic Artificial Intelligence and Creativity Laboratory

Meet our Lab Personnel

Director and Co-Director

Faculty

Current and Former Students

Senior Associate Faculty

Victor Raskin, Ph.D., is an emeritus distinguished professor of Linguistics, founder and chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Linguistics, professor of Computer Science (Courtesy Appointment), founder and coordinator of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory, and charter director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University. He earned all of his degrees in Structural, Computational and Mathematical Linguistics from Moscow State University, now Moscow Lomonosov University (Ph.D., 1970; M.A./M.S., 1966, B.A./B.S., 1964), with minors in mathematical logic, computer science and cognitive psychology. He taught at his alma mater from 1966-1973, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (full time) and Tel Aviv University (part-time) from 1973-78, the University of Michigan (Spring 1978), and Purdue University (since Fall 1978), where he is now a distinguished professor of English and Linguistics; He has published 17 books and more than 200 papers on natural language semantics and its applications, from such soft ones as rhetoric and humor research to such hard ones as linguistic engineering, natural language and information processing, computational humor/social computing, natural language information assurance security and—most recently—robotic intelligence and communication.

Associate Faculty

Raúl Aranovich, Ph.D., is a theoretical linguist specializing in the grammar of various romance languages. He studies grammatical mismatches between syntax, morphology and semantics using natural language processing and corpus linguistics tools. He also works on computer-mediated communication. Aranovich earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from UC San Diego in 1996 and has been an associate professor at UC Davis since 2001. Before UC Davis, he held faculty positions at Ohio State University and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Julia M. Rayz, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. She earned multiple degrees from the University of Cincinnati and worked as a senior research engineer at RiverGlass, Inc. before joining CERIAS as a research assistant professor in 2011. She is currently a tenure-track assistant professor and fellow of CERIAS, with expertise in various fields, including artificial intelligence, information security and computational semantics.

Tristan Miller, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has a computer science doctorate from Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he works as a research scientist in the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab. He previously worked at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Griffith University and the University of Toronto. He also worked for InQuira, an enterprise knowledge management company, as a language engineer and business analyst from 2008 to 2011. Miller’s research focuses on natural language processing and computational lexical semantics. He has authored over two dozen peer-reviewed papers and is a science popularizer, contributing to publications such as “Babel: The Language Magazine” and “Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.”

Consultants

Gerald Burnand is a data scientist at Ezoic. He is an expert on AI-based processes and products with experience across application domains including natural language processing.

Bill DeSmedt has 25 years of experience creating Intelligent Conversational Agents that use natural language processing and knowledge representation to simulate personalities and hold conversations. He is the creator of MetaLang™, a knowledge-based, language-independent conversational agent technology. Bill has a strong background in systems design and development and has authored two novels, as well as some journal articles and seminar papers on knowledge engineering. He also has a blog on English grammar, usage and writing style.

Courtney Falk, Ph.D., is the senior research scientist for the Optic Global Threat Intelligence Center. Courtney works on applications of ontologies to information security problems. He earned his Ph.D. in information security from Purdue University. For his dissertation, Courtney applied Ontological Semantics Technology to the problem of detecting malicious phishing emails. Courtney has worked in information security in the government, private and academic sectors. Courtney’s current goals are combining standard machine learning techniques with ontological semantics such as automated knowledge acquisition and text-meaning representation generation.

Larry Lefkowitz, Ph.D., has more than thirty years of experience in the Artificial Intelligence industry. From co-founding and directing an AI research lab in academia to managing a professional services business optimization practice with 60 staff members, Larry has focused on applying knowledge-based solutions to improve the use of AI in industries worldwide. Larry’s expertise builds relationships between clients and solution providers, as well as aligning strategic objectives with the necessary tactical activities to achieve them.

Gavin Matthews, M.A., is a senior software engineer at Apertura Data. As a highly-creative researcher and inventive problem-solver, Gavin has considerable expertise in data science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Joe Toplyn, MBA, is a comedian who has earned three Emmy Awards using his wit and love of language. After achieving success in LA, Joe and his family relocated to New York, where he became the head writer for the Late Show with David Letterman. Later on, he transitioned into cable television as a writer and producer for the comedic detective show Monk. Today, Joe holds a patent for Witscript, a software product he created that uses AI to improvise jokes.