S.B., electrical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ph.D., computer science, Stanford University. Taught at University of Northern Iowa, Middlebury College, Stanford University. Research at SRI International, AT&T Bell Laboratories. Grants and awards: IBM, National Science Foundation, Stanford University, AT&T Bell Laboratories. Recent papers include “WordNet-Based Lexical Simplification of a Document” (KONVENS 2012), "Automatic Reduction of a Document-Derived Noun Vocabulary” (FLAIRS 2011); early papers include "Becoming a Computer Scientist: A Report by the ACM Subcommittee on the Status of Women in Computing Science" (Communications of the ACM, 33:11, 1990; reprinted in 1992, 1997, and 2002 in other print and online publications). At Bard since 2000.

Interests:

Research Interests: Coordination and communication in multi-agent systems; representation of, and reasoning about, mental status of agents; adaptive and augmented communication software tools for communicatively-disabled people

Teaching Interests: Mind, brain, and behavior; introductory programming; computer architecture; theory of computation; First-Year Seminar

Other Interests: Societal impact of computing technology; cognitive science

Highlights:

2012-09-20 — Publication
“WordNet-Based Lexical Simplification of a Document,” with S. Anderson, in the Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2012), September 2012.

2011 — Publication
“Automatic Reduction of a Document-Derived Noun Vocabulary,” with S. Anderson, C. Segal, and Y. Wu, in the Proceedings of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-24).

2007-11-29 — Lecture
"A Checkers Player That Can't Be Beat," Bard College, Science on the Edge lecture series. A report on the recent result ("Checkers is Solved," Schaeffer et al, Science, Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1518 - 1522) reporting that the game of checkers has been determined to be a draw, in which I described the computational techniques used in proving this assertion.

2007 — Publication
“TICK: A Content Management System Framework for Semantic Web Research and Instruction,” with R. W. McGrail, in the Proceedings of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-20).

2003 — Publication
"The Genome Generator: Simulating the Development of Junk DNA," with R. McGrail and M. Tibbetts, in the Journal of Computing in Small Colleges 18:5, May 2003, pp.72-84.)

2000-07-01 — Appointment
Associate professor, Bard College

1994-07-09 — Grant
National Science Foundation

1990 — Publication
“Becoming a Computer Scientist: A Report by the ACM Subcommittee on the Status of Women in Computing Science,” with A. Pearl, M. E. Pollack, E. Riskin, E. Wolf, and A. Wu, in Communications of the ACM 33:11, November 1990, pp. 47-57.

Reprinted in In Search of Gender Free Paradigms for Computer Science Education, C. Dianne Martin and Eric Murchie-Beyma, editors, International Society for Technology in Education, 1992.

Reprinted in Literacy, Technology, and Society: Confronting the Issues, Gail Hawither and Cynthia Selfe, editors, Prentice Hall, 1997.

Reprinted in Inroads - SIGCSE Bulletin, 34:2, pp.135-144, June 2002. (This is a special issue of Inroads on the topic Women and Computing, Tracy Camp, editor.)

Contact:

Website: http://inside.bard.edu/~thomas
E-mail: thomas@bard.edu