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David Reitter

Applied Cognitive Science Lab
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
research
How does the mind work? I would like to understand what makes us intelligent, and why we make mistakes at times. As a computional cognitive scientist, I study language processing, dialogue, and decision-making. My work is computational in two ways. (1) I use data science techniques for inference from large-scale datasets and experiments. (2) I create computational, cognitive and statistical models to contribute to a unified theory of cognition. My work in cognitive science is aided by computational linguistics; my research in computer science is inspired by cognition.

My research group is primarily supported by the National Science Foundation (several recent projects).

David Reitter
what's new in our research group?
  • Dr. Alexander G. Ororbia II, thesis defense passed: Coordinated local learning algorithms for continuously adaptive neural systems.
    Next: Assistant Professor Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology.
  • Reitter, Tenured, Associated.
  • New Postdoc: Welcome, Jesus Calvillo.
  • Dr. Yang Xu, thesis defense passed: Towards an Information-Based Theory of Language Production in Dialogue.
    Next: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, San Diego State University.
  • Penn State IST junior excellence in research award 2017/2018
  • Y. Xu, J. Cole, D. Reitter, Not That Much Power: Linguistic Alignment is Influenced More by Low-Level Linguistic Features Rather than Social Power (ACL 2018)
  • J. Cole, D.Reitter The Timing of Lexical Memory Retrievals in Language Production (NAACL 2018)
  • PhD candidate Yang Xu wins 2018 College of IST Ph.D. Award for Research Excellence.
  • McDonnell Foundation funds grant in education and understanding dialogue engagement (with Co-PIs at Sherice N. Clarke, UCSD and Amy Ogan, CMU).
  • Dr. Moojan Ghafurian PhD defense 11/2017. Next: U Waterloo, Computer Science.
  • NSF grant funded (Perception, Action&Cognition + Robust Intelligence): Inference of the syntactic and semantic relationships between words from an untagged corpus using a distributional model of semantics derived from human memory theory (co-authored by post-doc Matthew Kelly). Post-doc filled.
  • Alex Ororbia, new paper in Neural Computation (with T. Mikolov and D. Reitter), "Learning Simpler Language Models with the Delta Recurrent Neural Network Framework."
  • 2018 Cognition paper by Yang Xu has appeared: Entropy in conversation: Towards an information-theoretic model of dialogue
  • Dr. Yafei Wang: PhD defense 4/2017. Next: IBM Research.
  • ACL 2017 paper by Yang Xu: Spectral Analysis of Information Density in Dialogue Predicts Collaborative Task Performance
  • 2017 TopiCS issue out on Computational Models of Memory
  • The book is out: Big Data in Cognitive Science (M. Jones, ed.) - with a chapter on studies in computational psycholinguistics.
bio
Penn State, 2018-:   Assoc. Professor, Information Sciences
Penn State, 2012-2018:   Asst. Professor, Information Sciences
Carnegie Mellon, 2008-11:  Post-doc, Psychology
Edinburgh, 2008:  PhD, Informatics/Cognitive Science
U. C. Dublin, 2004:  MSc, Computer Science
Potsdam, 2002:  Dipl., Linguistics
Founder, 2005-:  Aquamacs Emacs