Michael McTear

Michael McTear is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge Engineering at the University of Ulster with a special research interest in spoken language technologies. He graduated in German Language and Literature from Queens University Belfast in 1965, was awarded MA in Linguistics at University of Essex in 1975, and a PhD at the University of Ulster in 1981. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii (1986-87), the University of Koblenz, Germany (1994-95), and University of Granada, Spain (2006- 2010). He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than 15 years and is the author of the widely used text book Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward the Conversational User Interface (Springer Verlag, 2004). He also is a co-author of the book Spoken Dialogue Systems (Morgan and Claypool, 2010). Michael has delivered keynote addresses at many conferences and workshops, including the EU funded DUMAS Workshop, Geneva, 2004, the SIGDial workshop, Lisbon, 2005, the Spanish Conference on Natural Language Processing (SEPLN), Granada, 2005, and has delivered invited tutorials at IEEE/ACL Conference on Spoken Language Technologies, Aruba, 2006, and ACL 2007, Prague. He has presented on several occasions at SpeechTEK, a conference for speech technology professionals, in New York and London. He is a certified VoiceXML developer and has taught VoiceXML at training courses to professionals from companies including Genesys, Oracle, Orange, 3, Fujitsu, and Santander. He was the main developer of the VoiceXML-based home monitoring system for patients with type-2 diabetes, currently in use at the Ulster Hospital, Northern Ireland.