Dr. Lara Jean Martin

About

Dr. Lara J. Martin (she/they) is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the CSEE department, researching human-centered artificial intelligence with a focus on natural language processing applications. They have worked in the areas of automated story generation, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools, AI for tabletop roleplaying games, speech processing, and affective computing—publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, and IJCAI. They have also been featured in Wired and BBC Science Focus magazine. Previously, Dr. Martin was a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Research interests

computational creativity, interactive narrative, narrative generation & understanding, dialog systems & conversational agents, cognitive systems, augmentative & alternative communication (AAC), prosody & emotion (affective computing), speech synthesis (text-to-speech)

Teaching interests

natural language processing, intro to AI, cognitive science, interactive fiction & text generation, neurosymbolic text generation, Social and Ethical Issues in Information Technology

Education

  • Ph D, Human-Centered ComputingGeorgia Institute of Technology (2021)
    Neurosymbolic Automated Story Generation
  • MS, Language TechnologiesCarnegie Mellon University (2015)
  • BS, Computer Science, LinguisticsRutgers University — New Brunswick (2013)