Sharon G. Small

Dr. Small's main area of research in the field of Artificial Intelligence is Computational Linguistics. This stemmed from her research work at SUNY Albany where Dr. Small was the lead research scientist and third phase co-PI of the HITIQA project funded under the federal government's AQUAINT program. The AQUAINT program (2001-2008) was a federally funded highly competitive program whose goal was to develop Advanced Question Answering tools for Intelligence Analysts. She has made significant advances in the field of Question Answering, specifically analytical question answering (AQA). Dr. Small was previous CEO of Language Analytical Corporation (2007-2010), where she focused on CL work on various federal contracts as well as National Science Foundation, Small business Innovation Research grants. She has recently designed a new robotics program for the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Small's work has been funded by IARPA and the NSF. She has numerous book chapters, conference papers and journal articles.

My Siena Experience

My Teaching Philosophy

She has implement a flipped classroom teaching style with students listening to lectures and reading from the textbook for homework assignments. This frees all of the class time to be interactive programming time with all students working on the laptops to finish challenging programming exercises.

What I Love About Siena

The freedom to explore new teaching styles is one of the things Dr. Small most enjoys about Siena College. Being able to bring this new type of fully interactive classroom and exciting research opportunities to the superior students at Siena is at the foundation of Dr. Small's teaching philosophy.

My Favorite Courses to Teach

Dr. Small currently teaches Introduction to Programming utilizing the java programming language.

My Professional Experience

Current Research

Dr. Small recently was recently awarded a prestigious Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant from the National Science Foundation. Titled "REU Site: Undergraduate Research on Artificial Intelligence and Text Analysis," this grant for $359,923 will provide a unique opportunity for undergraduates to develop research expertise in the field of Artificial Intelligence under the guidance of the Siena College Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SCIAI). Students from across the nation will apply to participate in this ten-week program as REU Scholars. A total of ten students will be accepted, two from Siena and eight from other colleges. Additionally, five Siena students will be employed as research peers. The program will repeat for three summers.
The National Science Foundation REU grant is typically awarded to large research institutions and highly selective liberal arts colleges. Of the 70 existing REU programs under the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science & Engineering, only three take place at undergraduate institutions. As such, this grant acknowledges the high level of excellence of Siena’s undergraduate research programs. More information about the program can be found at www.siena.edu/reu.

Articles & Book Reviews

• A Summer Program to Attract Potential Computer Science Majors
  ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
  2018
• Catch 'em Early: Internship and Assistantship CS Mentoring Programs for Underclassmen
  ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
  2018
• Connecting Colleges/Universities and Local High Schools: A New Model for High School CS Teacher Development
  ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
  2018
• Review of Information Extraction Technologies and Applications
  The Journal of Neural Computing and Applications
  2013
• HITIQA: High-quality intelligence through interactive question answering.
  Journal of Natural Language Engineering: Special Issue on Interactive Question Answering
  2008
• A model for quantitative evaluation of an end-to-end question answering system
  Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology
  2007
• A model for quantitative evaluation of an end-to-end question-answering system
  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  2007
• Using Interview Data to Identify Evaluation Criteria for Interactive, Analytical Question-Answering Systems
  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  2007
• Automated judgment of document qualities
  Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology
  2006
• Four Easy Ways to a Faster FFT
  Journal Math. Model. Algorithms
  2002

Books & Book Chapters

• Advances in Open-Domain Question Answering
  Springer
  2006
• New Directions in Question Answering, AAAI/MIT Press
  AAAI/MIT Press
  2004

Presentations

• Siena's Information Retrieval Assistant;
  2014
  Proceedings of TREC, Giathersburg, Maryland
• Siena's Twitter Information Retrieval System: The 2014 Microblog Track
  2014
  Proceedings of TREC, Gaithersburg, Maryland
• Revealing Contentious Concepts Across Social Groups
  2012
  In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Istanbul, Turkey
• SAWUS: Siena's Automatic Wikipedia Update System
  2012
  The Twenty-First Annual Text Retrieval Conference Proceedings, Gaithersburg, Maryland
• Siena's Twitter Information Retrieval System: The 2012 Microblog Track
  2012
  The Twenty-First Annual Text Retrieval Conference Proceedings, Gaithersburg, Maryland
• The Siena College Medical Information Retrieval System (MIRS)
  2012
  The Twenty-First Annual Text Retrieval Conference Proceedings, Gaithersburg, Maryland
• 10 Weeks to TREC: STIRS, Siena's Twitter Informational Retrieval System
  2011
  The Twentieth Text Retrieval Conference Proceedings, Gaithersburg, Maryland
• Acting your age online: Identifying user age from avatar chat, appearance, and behavior
  2011
  Scholar-to-scholar presentation at the 97th annual conference of the National Communication Association, New Orleans, Louisiana
• Gamer culture versus the culture of the game: An analysis of player behavior and gamer identity in Second Life
  2011
  12th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Seattle, Oregon
• Identifying social conformists in a virtual world
  2011
  12th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Seattle, Oregon
• Multi-Modal Annotation of Quest Games in Second Life
  2011
  Proceedings of The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Portland, Oregon
• (Tacitly) Collaborative Question Answering Utilizing Web Trails
  2010
  Proceedings of The International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Valetta, Malta
• HITIQA: A Question Answering Analytical Tool
  2005
  Proceedings of International Conf. On Intelligence Analysis, McLean, Virginia
• ILQUA--An IE-driven question answering system
  2005
  Proceedings of TREC, Washington D.C., United States of America
• Designing a Realistic Evaluation of an End-to-end Interactive Question Answering System
  2004
  Proceedings of LREC Conference, Lisbon, Portugal
• HITIQA: A Data Driven Approach to Interactive Analytical Question Answering
  2004
  Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference, Boston, Massachusetts
• HITIQA: Scenario Based Question Answering
  2004
  Proceedings of Human Language Technology workshop, Boston, Massachusetts
• HITIQA: Towards Analytical Question Answering
  2004
  Proceedings of The 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Geneva, Switzerland
• HITIQA: A Data Driven Approach to Interactive Question Answering: A Preliminary Report
  2003
  Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Advances in Question Answering, Stanford, California
• HITIQA: An Interactive Question Answering System, A Preliminary Report
  2003
  Proceedings of ACL '03, Workshop on QA, Sapporo, Japan
• Identification of effective predictive variables for document qualities
  2003
  Proceedings of 2003 Annual Meeting of American Society for Information Science and Technology, Medford, New Jersey
• Multimodal Interactive Question Answering
  2003
  Proceedings of PACLING '03, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Three easy steps to a faster FFT (no, we don't need a plan)
  2001
  Proceedings of 2001 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, Orlando, Florida
• Three easy steps to a faster FFT (the story continues ..)
  2001
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Imaging Science, Systems, and Technology, Las Vegas, Nevada