David R. Traum

David R. Traum is a Research Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Southern California, affiliated with the Institute for Creative Technologies. He leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group and has extensive experience as a workshop organizer and program committee member in discourse and dialogue research.

• Research Interests: Dialogue systems for virtual humans and robots, computational linguistics, multimodal interaction, dialogue genres, and knowledge representation in practical dialogue systems.
• Professional Activities: Founded multiple workshops including the International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology (IWSDS), served on SIGDIAL executive and as past president, and contributed to standardization efforts in language resources via ISO TC 37/SC 4.
• Teaching: Instructs CSCI 644: Natural Language Dialogue Systems at USC and has taught similar courses at institutions like University of Maryland and ESSLLI summer schools.
• Labs & Collaborations: Leads the ICT Natural Language Dialogue Group, which focuses on projects like Formalizing Dialogue Genres, Multimodal Grounding, and Cross-Cultural Conversational Backchannels.