Sarah Ackerman
While obtaining her B.A. in Linguistics, Sarah Ackerman developed an obsession with the human attempt to speak with non-humans. Mankind is on a sustained mission to bridge the communication gap; we train dogs to recognize words, teach chimpanzees to communicate using pictures or hand signs, and study the whistles of dolphins. Now working on her PhD in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, Sarah's primary interests are in natural language understanding/generation and human-robot interaction. She aims to advance the way we communicate with machines and believes that we will discover something about ourselves and the nature of language in the process.
