• graduated! sixth year phd candidate
  • computer and information sciences
  • university of delaware
  • burns [at] udel [dot] edu

Curriculum Vitae

(pdf version)

Education

  • (expected summer 2012)Ph.D. candidate, Computer Science
    University of Delaware, Newark, DE
    Thesis: Intention Recognition of Grouped Bar Charts in Multimodal Documents
    Advisor: Dr. Sandra Carberry
    February 2010Qualifying Examinination (Dissertation Proposal)
    January 2008Preliminary Examination
    Advisor: Dr. Sandra Carberry
  • May 2008M.S., Computer Science
    University of Delaware, Newark, DE
    GPA: 3.83 [10 courses]
  • May 2006B.A., Computer Science
    Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA
    Cum Laude, Departmental Honors

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Retrieval

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer and Daniel Chester. Automatically Recognizing Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams '12), pp. 8-22, 2012. (pdf)
    Best Student Paper Award
    Acceptance Rate: 30%
  • Richard Burns, Terry Harvey, Lori Pollock. An Experience Report on Cross-Semester Student Critique and Action in an Integrated Software Engineering, Service Learning Course. In First International Workshop on Software Engineering Education based on Real-World Experiences (EduRex at International Conference on Software Engineering: ICSE '12), pp 21-24, 2012. (pdf)
  • Richard Burns, Lori Pollock, Terry Harvey. Integrating Hard and Soft Skills: Software Engineers Serving Middle School Teachers. In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '12), pp. 209-214, 2012. (paper pdf) (slides pdf)
    Acceptance Rate: 35%
  • Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer, Richard Burns, Peng Wu, Daniel Chester, Seniz Demir. Information Graphics in Multimodal Documents. To appear in Multimedia Information Extraction: Advances in video, audio, and imagery extraction for search, data mining, surveillance, and authoring. Wiley-IEEE Computer Science Press. Mark T. Maybury ed. 2012. (ISBN-13: 978-1118118917)
  • Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer. Visual and Spatial Factors in a Bayesian Reasoning Framework for the Recognition of Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts. In Papers from the AAAI Workshop on Visual Representations and Reasoning, Technical Report WS-10-07, pp. 6-13, 2010. (pdf)
  • Richard Burns, Stephanie Elzer and Sandra Carberry. Modeling Relative Task Effort for Grouped Bar Charts. In Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci '09), pp. 2292-2297, 2009. (pdf)
    Acceptance rate: 32%
  • Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry and Stephanie Elzer. Processing Information Graphics in Multimodal Documents. In Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium: Multimedia Information Extraction, Technical Report FS-08-05, pp. 5-9, 2008. (pdf)
  • Richard Burns, Stephanie Elzer and Sandra Carberry. Estimating Effort for Trend Messages in Grouped Bar Charts. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams '08), (Poster), pp. 353-356, 2008. (pdf) (poster)
  • Stephanie Elzer, Richard Burns and Sandra Carberry. The Role of Cognitive Modeling in an Automated System for Understanding Bar Charts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Models of Human Spatial Reasoning (at Spatial Cognition: SC '08), pp. 1-6, 2008. (pdf)

Presentations and Panels

  • SigAI, (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, weekly UD seminar), 2012, University of Delaware. A Framework for the Recognition of Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts.
  • SIGCSE (43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education), 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina. Integrating Hard and Soft Skills: Software Engineers Serving Middle School Teachers.
  • ITiCSE (16th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education), 2011, Darmstadt, Germany. Combining Multiple Pedagogies to Boost Learning and Enthusiasm, for Dr. Lori Pollock and Dr. Terry Harvey.
  • Gulf-South Summit on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Through Higher Education, 2011, Roanoke, Virginia. Panel: Service-Learning in Computer and Information Science
  • AAAI Workshop: Visual Representations and Reasoning, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia. Visual and Spatial Factors in a Bayesian Reasoning Framework for the Recognition of Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts.
  • SigNLP, (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing, weekly UD seminar), 2010, University of Delaware. ACT-R: As a Device for the Cognitive Scientist.
  • CogSci (31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society), 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Modeling Relative Task Effort for Grouped Bar Charts.
  • SigNLP, (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing, weekly UD seminar), 2009, University of Delaware. Exploiting Article Text in Grouped Bar Chart Recognition.
  • Cognitive Science Graduate Student Conference, (an annual refereed conference featuring graduate work at UD), 2009, University of Delaware. Visual and Spatial Factors in Graph Cognition.
  • AAAI Fall Symposium: Multimedia Information Extraction, 2008, Arlington, Virginia. Processing Information Graphics in Multimodal Documents.
  • SigNLP, (Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing, weekly UD seminar), 2007, University of Delaware. Toward a Computational Modeling of Grouped Bar Chart Tasks.

Teaching Experience

Recognition

  • 2011Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, University of Delaware, CIS Department.
    Monetary award given to one Computer and Information Sciences graduate teaching assistant each year in recognition of teaching excellence.

Instructor, Saint Joseph's University

  • Summer 2010Instructor
    Artificial Intelligence (Graduate), Saint Joseph's University.
    Developed and taught 6-week graduate-level summer course; topics included problem solving, search techniques, knowledge representation, inference in first-order logic, planning, reasoning under uncertainty, machine learning, and real-world applications; designed syllabus, chose course textbook, created homework assignments, and exams.
    Class webpage: http://www.cis.udel.edu/~burns/AI

Teaching Assistantships @ University of Delaware

  • Fall 2011CIS 374: Learning Game Development
  • Spring 2011CIS 374: Learning Game Development
  • Fall 2010CIS 374: Learning Game Development
  • Spring 2010CIS 355: Computer Ethics
  • Spring 2010CIS 361: Operating Systems (undergraduate)
  • Winter 2010CIS 101: Introduction to Computers
  • Fall 2009CIS 374: Learning Game Development
  • Fall 2009CIS 662: Computer Architecture (graduate)
  • Spring 2009CIS 489/689: Information Retrieval
  • Spring 2009CIS 320: Algorithms (undergraduate)
  • Fall 2006CIS 105: Introduction to Computer Science

Teaching Assistantships @ Saint Joseph's University

  • Spring 2006CIS 2301: Data Structures
  • Fall 2005CISC 1401: Introduction to Java
  • Spring 2005CIS 1601: Intermediate Computer Science
  • Fall 2004CISC 1401: Introduction to Java

Additional Teaching Experience

  • Summer 2011Mentor
    University of Delaware, College of Engineering.
    Advised and directly supervised high school summer scholar over 6-week internship. Topics included exploring educational learning software for middle school environments.
  • Summer 2012CCCS Middle School Teacher Workshop
    Winter 2012
    Summer 2010
    University of Delaware
    Assisted advisory panel in planning, coordinating, and executing workshop on the XO laptop and computational thinking in middle school classrooms for over 20 middle school teachers. Responsibilities included leading discussions, facilitating teacher working groups, capturing productions, and coordinating undergraduate helpers.
  • Summer 2006Alice
    Dr. Stephen Cooper, Saint Joseph's University.
    Developed chapter tests for the textbook Learning With Alice.
    Book page: http://www.aliceprogramming.net/

Additional Research Experience

  • Fall 2010 - PresentGraduate Fellow
    PIs: Dr. Lori Pollock and Dr. Terry Harvey, University of Delaware
    Support: National Science Foundation, Grant No. CNS-0940501
    Computing Teams 4 Youth is a partnership with a local underprivileged chart school with goals of positively impacting (1) middle school students through computational learning and (2) college computer science students through service learning. The model is implemented through the University of Delaware Educational Game Development course (see Teaching Experience).
    Project page: https://sites.google.com/site/computeteams4youth/
  • July 2008Summer School Workshop Participant
    ACT-R
    Selected to attend a 2-week summer school limited to 12 participants on the ACT-R cognitive theory at Carnegie Mellon University. Began work on a cognitive model that estimates the perceptual effort necessary for recognizing messages in grouped bar charts. Participated in an accelerated course on the ACT-R theory and cognitive framework.
  • Spring 2007 - Fall 2008Research Assistant: Exploiting Communicative Signals to Summarize Information Graphics
    PI: Dr. Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware
    Support: National Science Foundation, Grant No. IIS-0534948
    Investigated information graphics as a communicative device. Began work on a system which automatically recognizes high-level messages that are contained in grouped bar chart information graphics.
  • Summer 2005Undergraduate Summer Scholar
    Undergraduate thesis: Use of natural language processing to improve use cases.
    Advisor: Dr. Jonathan Hodgson, Saint Joseph's University
    Designed and implemented system which automatically detected ill-formed specifications in use cases and offered suggested revisions.

Service

  • Program Committee: ACL 2010 (Association of Computational Linguistics), Student Research Workshop
  • Reviewer: CogSci 2010 (Cognitive Science Conference)
  • Officer: UPE 2005, Vice President of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Saint Joseph's University Chapter, 2005

Honors and Awards

  • Best Student Paper Award, Diagrams Conference, 2012
  • Quantum Leap Innovations Graduate Student Excellence Award, University of Delaware, Computer and Information Sciences, 2012
  • Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, University of Delaware, Computer and Information Sciences, 2011
  • Professional Development Award, University of Delaware Graduate Office, 2010
  • Travel Grant, Cognitive Science Society, 2009
  • Alumni Enrichment Award, University of Delaware, 2009
  • Professional Development Award, University of Delaware Graduate Office, 2008
  • Full graduate support, University of Delaware, 2006

Membership in Societies

  • ACM, Association for Computing Machinery
  • Cognitive Science Society
  • AAAI, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
  • Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Saint Joseph's University Chapter
  • Sigma Xi, Saint Joseph's University Chapter

Proficiencies

  • Languages: Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, Lisp, R, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS
  • OS: Windows, OS X, Solaris, Linux