Casey Kennington

Casey Kennington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boise State University. His primary research focuses on interactive spoken dialogue systems, semantics, human-robot interaction, and language acquisition. He leads the Speech, Language and Interactive Machines Group (SLIM Group), which explores embodied AI, incremental processing, and multimodal interaction. His work bridges computational linguistics, robotics, and cognitive science, with applications in education and healthcare.

Key research areas include:

• Dialogue Systems: Developing incremental and multimodal dialogue frameworks for real-time human-robot interaction.
• Language Grounding: Investigating symbol grounding through object permanence and perceptually-driven models.
• Child Language Acquisition: Improving ASR for children and designing child-oriented spellcheckers like KidSpell.
• Robotics: Building systems that integrate emotion displays and multimodal learning for social robots.

Notable contributions include the OpenDial toolkit for probabilistic dialogue systems and the PentoRef corpus for task-oriented dialogue analysis. His work emphasizes ethical AI design, particularly in child-robot interactions and educational technologies.

Awards and recognition are not explicitly listed in the provided texts, though his impactful research in dialogue systems and robotics is widely cited in venues like ACL, SIGDIAL, and LREC. He actively contributes to conferences such as the Workshop on Dialogue and Robots (SLIVAR) and collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with educational institutions and industry partners.