Rodney Nielsen

• PhD, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2008.
  Major: Cognitive Science
• PhD, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2008.
  Major: Computer Science
• MS, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2005.
  Major: Computer Science
• BA, Minot State University, 1986.
  Major: Mathematics
• BS, Minot State University, 1986.
  Major: Computer Science

Dr. Nielsen's research is primarily in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on Educational Technology, Health & Clinical Informatics, and their confluence – Educational Health & Wellbeing Companion Robots. He is currently researching emotive, perceptive, spoken-dialogue companion robots, in the form of stuffed animals, to assist the elderly and isolated in need of special care. Such Companionbots might help seniors maintain their independence and continue to live in their homes. Dr. Nielsen is also inventing the future of classroom education with human language technology that facilitates a teacher's real-time understanding of the students' ongoing subject comprehension. He has developed machine learning algorithms to recognize elementary school students' understanding of science concepts when interacting with Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and is developing an end-to-end question answering and data mining system for clinical informatics. He has researched computational models for recognizing textual entailment, labeling semantic roles (predicate argument structure) in text, and estimating class probabilities in machine learning, among other things. He also has an extensive background in software engineering, including research in the areas of software re-engineering environments, operations research, automated software testing, and automatic code generation.